90% of the time I try to come up with systems more elaborate than a spreadsheet, I realize I’ll spend longer designing and maintaining it than I will actually using it. You really only see those efficiencies across larger organizations and even then it isn’t a given these sorts of systems will be well-maintained, and the benefits they provide are usually not so much efficiency as standardizing the way that users record data. This standardization is in turn mostly useful because it allows larger groups of people to coordinate across time and space (e.g. calendar events, and records of those calendar events for employees who joined years after they occurred).

At an individual level you’re basically always better off using text files as the equivalent of a machine-readable blank piece of paper to scrawl notes on with minimal (if any) thought being given to other features.