For about six months I had a very organized board. Sections with labels. Color-coded markers for different types of things. A small legend in the corner explaining what the colors meant. A friend who saw it said it looked like a war room. I thought that was a compliment.
It wasn't sustainable. The colors required thought at the point of writing — I'd be standing there with a marker trying to remember what blue meant versus green. The sections required me to have already categorized the thing before I wrote it, which is exactly backwards — the board is where I figure out what things are, not where I record them after they're already figured out.
I erased the legend and the section dividers. I kept a single black marker and a single red marker — red for the things that actually need to happen before anything else. That's the entire system.
What I found is that the organization emerges naturally when it's needed. If I have five things on the board related to the same project they end up near each other because that's how I wrote them. If something is urgent it goes at eye level. If it can wait it goes in the corner. None of this required a system. It just happened.
I think a lot of productivity systems are solving the problem of not trusting yourself to prioritize in the moment. The system decides what matters so you don't have to. But the cost is that you're now maintaining the system rather than doing the things. At some threshold the overhead exceeds the benefit.
For me the threshold was very low. The system I have now is: write it down, erase it when it's done, put important things somewhere visible. That's it.