Horses for courses: Voodoopad, Tinderbox, Curio, Devonthink, etc

Posted by Prion
Mar 1, 2013 at 07:01 PM

Hi
first post from me but I have been lurking for a long time here. In real life I am an academic and as such am involved in many projects, some are in the acquisition phase (gathering information about funding agencies, collecting calls for funding programs etc), some are in the experimental phase (collecting and analyzing data), some are in paper writing stage, some involve only myself, some a few other people from my lab as well as other collaborators elsewhere, some involve expeditions, others conferences, students I supervise, theses to read, reviews to write, note-taking, idea-capturing, duration of projects ranges from weeks to years or decades…..you get the picture: THE perfect habitat to get hopelessly lost in. So far I managed to keep my head above the water but there must be better ways especially when it comes to choosing the tools to stay organized.

I know lots of you have experience with some of the programs I am using or evaluating in order to help me tame the chaos.
I have already tried the two extremes and found out that neither of these approaches work for me:
1) know one program well and use it for everything, even despite some weaknesses here and there
2) pick THE best software for each job and use each of these programs (and possibly more)
3) pick a really geeky program and get lost without getting anything done (actually, I achieved that goal pretty well, but now I know that I cannot master org-mode)

What are your suggestions for a good balance between points 1 and 2? I’d love to hear about lessons you learned from wrestling with similar problems, what are the fundamentally different tasks that you accept using different tools for?

Looking forward to hearing from you
Prion