I log, "stray thoughts". I put these in a physical notebook but Google Keep or Apple Notes works just as well. Anything goes and everything goes in the same place.
At the beginning of my day, I "translate" my hastily written thoughts into more complete notes in a flat text file. Each thought is written on a single line in a way that I could read and understand it out of context.
I use hash tags to categorize and to link other ideas (by line number).
I also created a biblio.txt file that has URLs, names, book titles, and other references in it. I use curly braces to link a note to a reference.
Example:
Pencils are longer lasting than pens. #324 #327 #writing {26}
The real magic happens when I use my text editors search feature to research all my previous thoughts about something in my flat text file.
Can your system do hyperlinking and filtering by one or more tags?
Have a look and see if it works for you.
Has anyone done something like that before? How did you do it in a sane way? Do you just start at the end and work forwards? Do you have some kind of #tagging system and then you applied something like elasticsearch or sqlite to filter them?