Rotational Advice Please!!

I do rotational exclusively, and never kept notes. The story album and memory system are quite adequate for remembering what happend to who when, as Cinebar pointed out. My standard approach is to pick a given family (usually one I've made) as the central characters and go until I hit a logical stopping point. Then it's on to family/sim 2, often whoever was on welcome detail. The style is play B as a 'while that was happening to A, this is happening to B' and so on until I get back to A and start the cycle over again. What I usually wind up with is a set of 3-4 families that know one another and have inter-connected stories. It is quite easy to have another set in the same town doing the same thing, but have little to no connection with the first set. The possibilities are limited only by your imagination and time available for simming.

I play rotationally by season. Taking notes is only a thing for me when I play the university neigborhood as I only have two seasons there (spring/fall).
What I write down there is the household name and then I make a tally sheet.
However, I play "The Sims 2" after playing "The Sims 4" for years and I kind of want to have the same outcomes. So I just take the lists I have from "The Sims 4" and use them for "The Sims 2" (dating list; children's names).

I played TS2 rotational, and now use the same ways of playing in TS4.
I have an actual notebook (my husband thinks it's quite funny) where I tally days played etc so every household can keep up. I hate cousins etc over taking each other in age.
I make notes of personality, lifetime wants and other little useful bits of information about my Sims for when I come to write my stories.

I'm a terrible rotational player, too, and never even really tried as a kid. I just made my family and stuck to them forever. And because I hated rotating families, I would just make everyone from the family live together until death. That means grandma and grandpa had to go before I had any new kids. I preferred doing it this way simply because I'm terrible at keeping track of time in the Sims. If I'm having fun in a Sim game, I won't notice how many days I've played, or how many seasons went by. It's just a lot of math to deal with that my brain just doesn't.

However, I've recently started getting back into Sims 2, and really wanna give rotational play a chance. I just have to get a system going, which will most likely be some usage of WordPad. I am also thinking of using the Neighborhood stories as a way to keep the neighborhood updated for me. If I run off to rotate a few families and come back to the first, I'll end up forgetting what I was even doing with them to begin with. But the neighborhood stories will help me keep track of my thoughts, which makes setting up my Sims' stories a whole lot easier.

I plan on doing this with the premades in Pleasantview first. Too bad I do not have the patience to make my own neighborhood from the ground up, or I totally would. But that's a lot of work for me that I'm not willing to do. Maybe eventually, after I've gotten used to rotational play lol

So my TL;DR advice? Notes and Neighborhood stories. Also, weekly play. A week in Sim time gives you a little time to play around and have fun with the family before switching to another.

I've started playing with a different sort of rotational play. I always felt personally that my regular rotational neighborhoods ended up getting way overpopulated with a ton of different families to a point where I eventually would just abandon that hood and start fresh. I've always played 3 days per lot in my rotational hoods and if I have a college hood I play the households there for a full year (two semesters), because it matches up with the teenage life span if I send them to college 12 days away from adulthood.

Currently I do rotational play a bit differently to keep it exciting, so every time a rotational cycle is done I pick one or multiple sims depending on the total sims in the hood to die. This functions as a sort of population control for me and also brings in the excitement of possible random deaths back for me, because currently I get early deaths very rarely nowadays. So at the end of a cycle a sim gets axed if they get chosen by Wheel Decide no matter the plans I had for said sim.

I play like @Cinebar - I don't stick to an exact schedule but rotate around Sims within connected stories.