The fix isn't a complicated system. It's a few decisions made early, before the chaos has time to build up.
Notebook per area of life, not per topic
The instinct most people start with is one notebook per topic: a notebook for work, one for a specific project, another for that course you're taking. This works for about a month, then you've got twenty-three notebooks and no idea which one has the thing you need.
A steadier approach is one notebook per area of life: Work, Home, a specific big project if it's genuinely large enough to earn its own space, Personal. Topics live as pages inside those, not as entirely new notebooks. If you're ever unsure whether something deserves its own notebook, the honest test is: will I still be adding to this in three months? If not, it's a page, not a notebook.
Give each one a cover you'll actually recognise
This sounds like decoration, but it's genuinely functional. When you're scanning a list of notebooks quickly, a distinct cover, a colour, an icon, a doodle, gets recognised faster than a title does. Your eye catches the visual before it reads the text. It's the same reason a bookshelf is easier to scan by spine colour than by title alone.
This is part of why Doodlik lets you personalise covers rather than defaulting every notebook to the same plain block, it's not just for the sake of it looking nice, a recognisable cover is doing real work when you're trying to find something fast.
Keep one notebook that's allowed to be messy
Every organised system needs an escape valve, somewhere thoughts can go before they're sorted, without breaking the structure everywhere else. Call it Inbox, Scratch, whatever, the name doesn't matter. What matters is giving yourself permission to dump something there without deciding immediately where it truly belongs. Trying to file every thought perfectly the moment you have it is what makes people abandon note-taking systems entirely, the friction of deciding becomes bigger than the thought itself.
Once a week, or whenever it starts to feel full, go back and move things into where they actually belong. By then, it's usually obvious.
Lock what's actually private, share what's actually joint
Not everything needs to be shared, and not everything needs to be private, but it's worth being deliberate about which is which rather than defaulting everything to one or the other. A journal probably wants to be locked. A notebook you're building with a partner for holiday planning probably wants to be shared, with both of you editing it rather than one person owning it and forwarding updates.
Doodlik supports both, private notebooks that stay locked to you, and shared ones you can build together with someone else, so the decision is about what the notebook's actually for, not a workaround for a tool that only does one or the other.
Prune occasionally
The last habit is the one people skip: every so often, archive what you're not using. A notebook you haven't opened in four months isn't helping you stay organised, it's just adding to the pile you have to scroll past to find the ones that matter. You don't need to delete it, just get it out of your main view.
None of this needs to happen on day one. Start with two or three notebooks, add structure as you actually need it, and you'll end up with a system that fits how you really think, not one you copied from someone else's screenshot.