By treating it “like the commute” I mean, not keeping a record of it, and even making an effort to distract myself from it to forget about it.
Doesn’t the web page you found show the opposite, they treat every planet as worth recording in great detail, right? 
For an exploration game, such a searchable database would be fantastic, if you wanted to re-find a place.
They do, but also very few people are looking at that data. I’m not excluding myself here, I lost track of newly discovered exoplanets long ago. I am a space geek, but I’m ashamed to say that the railroad timetable is in fact more important data to me.
I think that’s what the galactic atlas was supposed to be. Unfortunately, without direct ingame support, it’s only half as useful. When it launched, I really thought they were going to provide some tools to write a short description for a discovery, attach some screenshots, and upload it to the atlas from inside the game. Kind of an upload+ mechanic (normal upload shares the discoveries and names with other players games, putting in some more effort enables you to upload it to the atlas for offline reference). Unfortunately (and, quite honestly rather inexplicably to my sensibilities) that never happened.