It sounds like you are probably getting bogged down in the details way too much. For the game I personally run, I don't keep giant lists of NPCs or intricate details of shops.
If you are running an Exploratory game, where the Characters don't know what all is out there, then you really shouldn't worry about anything that's beyond a few days travel of the Characters. If they are on foot, this is maybe 50 miles or so, there might only be 2 or 3 towns in that space. Or less depending on how you want to plan. If they have horses, it's maybe a couple hundred miles.
As far as remembering what is in town, I have a plan for what type of town it is; ie. farming community, Trading hub, mountain town... etc. That tells you what kind of stuff you're likely to find there. A farming community will probably have a blacksmith for plows, metal tools, but he probably won't be able to make alot of weapons or armor, there probably won't be alot of magic in the community since there won't be alot of money to pay for it. This logic flows into figuring out what shops will have on hand to sell and what they won't, most non-magic items are pretty common, alchemical stuff less so, and magic stuff is rarer still.
I try to play as much to 'reality' as possible and this dictates what is going to show up where. It also lets you build a place that totally breaks the mold if you want as well. How about a farming community that relies on magic to survive? a local druid comes and blesses the desert fields so they can grow crops they normally shouldn't, or instead of bulls pulling plows, it's unseen servents?
The idea of a traveling caravan is always interesting, alchemically powered or not, and Characters can have great opprotunites as guards/travelers/owners/whatever on them.
When a GM is getting bogged down by too many details my best advice is usually "have fun and improvise". If a GM can make stuff up off the top of their head that is interesting/balanced/believable, then you won't need to remember so much of the little stuff. Prepare what actually matters. You don't need to flesh out every NPC/store/sewer/item of a town, just do the main few that will have the most significance, then improv the rest. With good improv skills your players will feel like there is an entire living world before them, and you didn't even have to prepare half of it. I know being good at improv isn't a skill everyone is blessed with, but if you're feeling troubled by all these rules and details, just remember to have fun.
Short Answer: Ad hoc it.
Long Answer: If you're spending more time preparing for a session than the actual session, you're doing it wrong. You don't need details of every city in the world. You only need to know about the places the PCs will go in the next session. If they go somewhere you don't expect, then make it up on the fly. It's not easy, but it's more efficient than over-preparing and you'll get better at it the more you GM.
The same goes for details like shop inventories and NPCs. You don't need to keep a record of every shop's inventory or even exactly what shops there are. Just have an general idea in your head and then expand on it when the PCs arrive there. For example, if the PCs are looking for a potion shop, just describe one being there, say that they carry common 1st-level potions, and spend your effort roleplaying the shopkeeper and giving a colorful description of the shop.
If a party will be staying in a particular town as their base of operations, then it might be worth investing more time in designing the details of the city.
As for dungeons, make most encounters be CR = APL - 2 with some variations up to CR = APL. Have bosses be CR = APL + 1 or APL + 2. If you want to design the challenge of an entire dungeon, determine how much XP the entire dungeon will give and then divide the total XP up into encounters.
Yeah, detail isn't super important. There's some simple rules for town size and how much you can sell/buy in them somewhere. I don't use them all that much and tend to improvise but if you would like a solid set of rules there you go. I think kingmaker or ultimate campaign (or both) also has rules for random exploration so when youre dming and playing at the same time you get some fun suprises too.
Aaaanyway as long as everyone's happy and excited about the game than you're winning pathfinder. 'grats
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all good advice. Go into detail where you know its needed. Get a notebook and dividers and write down what you do improvise so you can remember it...or do what a lot of folks do and use a laptop or tablet, and open a notepad on it, and anything you improvise, add it to the notepad. Then after the session add it to a more permanent word doc or on print in the notebook. Im fairly old school so I use notebooks with section dividers, but then Im pretty organized in my play.
My advice is devote maybe 4 hours a week to preparing the game. This can be divided up as you see fit...but you want to prepare antagonists and possible monsters. Only prepare loose frameworks for shops...
like:
Gunsmith (CG): 3rd Gnome Expert Tanden Bolefar with gnsmithing at max ranks. + his partner Grek Thogburt 5th Hobgoblin Gunslinger. Owns a musket. Prices are average, service is excellent. hours are 9-5. Have anything under 200 gold readily available...can be tasked to make more. employ 3 others.
and only diagram that out for shops you think are very important.
Temples/Inns/Main Shops/Major people.
Buy the Gamemastery guide...it has a wealth of information...also if you can find the old AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide, the info their cannot be summed up. Its literally the biggest collection of interesting tidbits of info you can possibly find.
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If you ae looking for something to track the details that are important, you can try campaign cartographer or similar programs. Otherwise, just keep notes on any recurring and important details and ad lib then ignore the rest. getting bogged down in the details prevents you from keeping up with the fun and adventure. also, dont plan in too much detail as no adventure/town/npc survives contact with the pcs intact ;)
I've had a gaming world I've run literally hundreds of sessions in for going on 35 years now.
I also have notebooks full of notes. The main geologic areas (continents, seas, islands, mountain ranges, etc.) have roughly a page or so of notes describing their climate, major features and large-scale history.
The world is divided into a series of political units (countries, cities, etc.) and each major political unit has a page or two of notes describing the nation's economy, political system, major characters (good and evil) trade routes, etc. For any major city I have a page or so of notes describing that city that is much like the page describing a nation. I'll lay out the major points of interest for each city (usually including Inns, shops, temples, etc.)
However, to make things easier, I tend to have generic maps for temples, Inns, etc. I don't have specific layouts for each Inn. I tend to just reuse the same map over and over for buildings, small towns and even areas of open wilderness. It's just a lot of trouble to try to create a world map, and from a game play perspective, you just need a way to keep track of what the characters are doing, and there's no narrative reason why a battle wouldn't occur in a very similar setting on occasion. To make things a bit more random I use 3D terrain elements (hills, trees, bridges, etc.) which I place on the maps to create different tactical opportunities for combat.
It took me years to develop all that stuff though, so not sure how helpful that would be for you. My initial high-level descriptions of the major elements took me only a few months though, and I've just built on them over the years.