For work notes, I index by topic - not too difficult, those don't grow all that fast and finding a few minutes here and there to update the index is not hard. P

For work notes, I index by topic - not too difficult, those don't grow all that fast and finding a few minutes here and there to update the index is not hard. Page numbers increase monotonically across volumes, so cross-volume references by page number work okay; each volume's index covers only its own topics, but that hasn't been a problem so far since needing to refer across volumes is rare except around when one ends and another starts. For personal notes, I keep those in the same series of volumes as my diary, which I have not yet indexed. I have a very general system of colored tape flags for stuff like "essay ideas", "story ideas", etc., but nothing more specific than that. I began this diary in 2018; it's now around 1150 pages and about to enter volume 7, and the lack of detailed indexing is beginning to be a problem. For longer-running works, it is not rare to have substantive notes across three or four volumes. I've started looking for a workable method of maintaining an index by hand across so large a body of content, but haven't found anything that looks good so far - in particular, I don't yet know how to overcome the issue that a handwritten index can't feasibly be reordered to alphabetize or for any other reason. I'd dearly love to hear whatever experience-based suggestions anyone might care to make here!