Not just even for Haydee, but for any other adventure game. Resident Evil, Colossal Cave Adventure, Megami Tensei, etc.

At first I thought to try writing a description of each room in a text file using a novel system of naming only the main "Points of Interest" and then describing the connecting hallways using only a relative co-ordinate system. Just for example, the first room with a keycard was "Start" under this scheme (because everything before that point is straight-forward), and the room directly ahead of that "Start-N".
Under this scheme, the connecting rooms were a "Start-2N", a "Start-2NW" (locked from the other side - the first room with a robot in it) and a "Start-2NE" (which I would later identify as "Bridge"), and so on.
This obviously proved to be unsustainable for multiple reasons:

• Even though it might technically be feasible to record all of the data I'd need to mentally reconstruct the map of "Haydee", actually reading back through and understanding this text file is pretty difficult
  
• It's difficult to remember the point I arbitrarily designated as being "North" without any absolute indicator such as the Sun
  
• The scheme I've written to doesn't account for Y-levels, or height. The level of complexity that'd introduce would simply be too high for the map to be helpful anymore. However, many locations in the game are BUILT around verticality. Not just the obvious ones like the multi-level elevator shafts, but even little things like the pipe catwalks in the Green zone as well
  
• Especially for the reasons listed above, it's just a pointlessly time-consuming process in the first place

My second approach so far has to just been to quantify the treasure and locked boxes I come across in each nameable "area" in general, as well as describing the features of the room I find them in if they're important enough. This has been much more practical and I've come along much further into the game thanks to it, but it's still a little bit too broad to be useful with some of the truly Labyrinthian areas (the Red and Yellow zones feel this way to me) and some of the rooms are just SO conceptually similar that their names become useless later. There's probably at least five different locations describable as "box jumping puzzle" or "pipe maze". And what is anyone meant to do about the dark "crouching maze" in the Red zone? I've got the night vision of course, but I STILL feel like I haven't found everything there is to grab in there.

Neither of these are probably going to be any help with beating the game in under an hour once I become interested in trying to figure THAT out. Any advice? Maybe I should start using some kind of graphical flowchart program, or taking screenshots of the level? But screenshots feel kind of cheaty, plus not every area has a high vantage point I can see everything from...