How do you do it?

I've been getting more active with my photography for a few years now and it's starting to get messy.
On my hard drive I have my pictures in different folder by year and month, so it's quick and easy to just clear out my SD card.
Then in Lightroom I pick the images I like and want to use and put them in a collection. However usually I make one collection per "set" and very rarely group any of the collections. Only have a group for shooting at protests, one for portraits and a few for some multi-week trips I took that resulted in multiple photo-sets.
In my context a set is just a collection of images with a similar theme or from the same day that I post on social media or send to friends or whatever.

Having an ever growing list of collections seems like a problem waiting to happen, especially if I want to go pro one day, so I was wondering how you guys manage it? The only thing I've seen online that might be a good idea is maybe grouping my collections by location to make them a little easier to sort through when I end up visiting the same place multiple times.