What type of information do you find yourself losing track of? The GTD sections shouldn't be that big even when tracking a huge amount of projects, like if you had for example 100 projects and 100 next actions that you are actively working on. Each of those shouldn't take much space, maybe 1-2 lines on a notebook for each one project and each task, clear outcomes for projects, and a simple actions for next actions, about 20 pages overall? And that's for a huge amount of projects, I've never gotten anywhere near that in active projects, maybe 50-80 projects at times. Those 2 categories, plus a calendar, and a "waiting for" list, are the sections you may be looking at often on your day to day work when following GTD.
Everything else about your "active" projects goes a bit out of scope of what is defined by GTD and should go to "project reference material", like project planning, TODO lists, project structure, notes from meetings, sketches, ... those are kept in a much messier form by me, but I feel like as long as the big picture and hard commitments are clear on the GTD part, it's ok if sometimes I have to "dive down" into a specific project mess to clarify some things. It's just not ok if those 2 are mixed and make looking at your day-to-day GTD sections a nightmare.
I keep my paper GTD system on an A5 ring binder, something like a Filofax but a cheaper brand, with 1 plastic divider for each 4 (projects, next actions, waiting for, someday/maybe) of the 5 GTD hard-categories [1], with each section having about 1-5 pages. The calendar goes to Google Calendar just because it's convenient how it auto-adds meeting invitations.
For project reference material I keep an alphabetic index [2] on the same A5 binder for small projects, some dedicated folders or notebooks if the projects are huge, or a directory with files if the projects have some digital material, images, or links, that can't be easily tracked on paper. Those will look very different for each different project so don't really have much of a "system" for it, aside from keeping the hard-landscape tracked on GTD.
Everything else about your "active" projects goes a bit out of scope of what is defined by GTD and should go to "project reference material", like project planning, TODO lists, project structure, notes from meetings, sketches, ... those are kept in a much messier form by me, but I feel like as long as the big picture and hard commitments are clear on the GTD part, it's ok if sometimes I have to "dive down" into a specific project mess to clarify some things. It's just not ok if those 2 are mixed and make looking at your day-to-day GTD sections a nightmare.
I keep my paper GTD system on an A5 ring binder, something like a Filofax but a cheaper brand, with 1 plastic divider for each 4 (projects, next actions, waiting for, someday/maybe) of the 5 GTD hard-categories [1], with each section having about 1-5 pages. The calendar goes to Google Calendar just because it's convenient how it auto-adds meeting invitations.
For project reference material I keep an alphabetic index [2] on the same A5 binder for small projects, some dedicated folders or notebooks if the projects are huge, or a directory with files if the projects have some digital material, images, or links, that can't be easily tracked on paper. Those will look very different for each different project so don't really have much of a "system" for it, aside from keeping the hard-landscape tracked on GTD.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done#/media/Fil...
[2] https://appelboom.com/filofax-refill-personal-cream-alphabet...