The FUN and EFFICIENT note-taking system I use in my PhD

hello my name is morgan and i am a fifth year phd candidate in theater and performance studies and when i started my phd program i quickly realized that the way i was taking notes in undergrad just wasn't going to cut it for this new program so i started looking into different methods of note-taking that might help me out in my phd and specifically what i needed was a way to store huge amounts of information so that it was easily accessible at a later date when i needed it to write a paper and preferably all of that information would be fully interconnected with all of my other knowledge so that i can make surprising connections between my thoughts and turn them into creative and critical thinking within my papers and especially within my dissertation but that is kind of a big ask for a note-taking method to do and what i was doing in my undergrad was just highlighting quotes in books and writing in the margins and i would take notes on notebooks and yes i would organize those marking where each thing was in each book but then when i actually went to write a paper i would have like a stack of five notebooks i would have to be flipping through to see if i had written down the thought that i wanted to use for that paper but i couldn't even fully remember when and where i learned that thought and the only organizational method was when and where i learned that thought because you know it was organized by the courses i was taking not by logically where that information belongs in my brain so i i had a bit of a problem and whenever i went onto youtube say to look for a tutorial on how to take better notes it wouldn't be a holistic system of how to like store and organize those notes