Comment by mekoka

I've written thousands of notes with just vim and the file system for over 20 years with little protocol. It's worked out great for me. Simple short text files that eventually graduated to markdown. I have folders and subfolders for top level topic hierarchy. Usually just a single level, a parent folder and then files for specific topics. It rarely goes deeper than two levels. I title everything descriptively to guide me to find what I need later. Like I said, thousands of notes spanning 20 years, never a problem.

I'm no expert, but looking from afar it seems to me that complex note-taking systems are an optimization on some anticipated theoretical future problem that seldom materializes in practice, and I think trying to squeeze those promised extra 10% of efficiency might possibly qualify as diminishing returns.