Turn a messy note app into something you can find things in

Here's what my notes look like: {{describe the app, roughly how many notes, what kinds of things are in there, how you currently search}}. The moment I care about: {{when I need to find something and can't — describe a real recent example}}.

Design the smallest system that fixes that moment.

Start by sorting my note types into: things I retrieve on purpose, things I want to resurface accidentally, and things I only wrote to think and will never read again. The third pile gets no organisation at all.

For the first two, give me a structure with at most {{n}} top-level buckets, a naming convention I can follow while typing fast, and one rule for where a new note goes that has no exceptions.

Then: what to do with the existing backlog — and please consider 'archive it all and start clean' as a serious option, with the argument for and against.

Finish with the weekly five-minute maintenance step. If it needs more than five minutes, simplify the system.