My use of org actually quite closely manages your paper based approach. I have 3 main org files that cover the tasks you have described:
1. todo.org which has all my todo items. every now and again, I go through this list and schedule some of them. I do put deadlines on items if they have hard deadlines (i.e. of the type that says "this *has* to be done by then or else...") but I do not create artificial deadlines. 2. notes.org that is simple a collection of (a large number of) snippets, each in a single top level headline. These are all tagged when created with as many tags per entry as I can think of at the time. I can then usually find what I want very quickly through the tag search functionality in org-agenda (C-c a m TAG RET) with org-agenda bound to "C-c a". But see below. 3. diary.org for appointments and meetings. This is the file that sees the most activity but only because I seem to live in meetings these days... The key with the first two is to not worry about how you structure information. If all else fails, you can use the full power of Emacs to find things (occur; isearch-forward-regexp; etc.). HTH, eric -- : Eric S Fraga via Emacs 28.0.50, Org release_9.4-38-g16f505
