I'm slowly creating a new workflow for myself.  The old model from years past was essentially "dump everything into Evernote and rely on search."  This knew model I'm developing will need to be more sophisticated to keep up with all of the reading, writing, and information coming in with this doctoral work I'm doing.  Also, all of the energy that I'm placing in this workflow should lead to completing more writing projects. 

I've recently talked about Obsidian and how it's my new note taking system.  Really though, it's more of an idea builder.  It's not meant to be a repository of everything.  And really, the notes that I am keeping in Obsidian have a purpose, and when they've served their purpose or whenever I decide something is junk, it's going to the trash.  This ongoing garden of ideas in Obsidian serves as an aide to all of my course writing.  I'm taking notes while I read.  I'm taking notes in class.  I'm taking notes as I come across new resources.  Obsidian helps to make the necessary connections for producing a coherent written product later.   

I'm also learning that other kinds of information coming in needs to have other types of repositories.  For certain PDFs, websites, or books I'm finding that I need an extra layer of organization.  I need way to meticulously house metadata about all of these items, and I'm currenlty learning another tool called Zotero. 

Zotero has a great Mac app with free cloud sync.  It also has awesome browser plugins that do a great job in grabbing metadata for you.  There are also plugins for LibreOffice and Word.  This is all really handy, because Zotero's killer feature is that it will write a bibliography for you with all of that metadata that it's been grabbing.  All you need to do is double check that metadata and boom Zotero handles all the formatting.  This has already proven handy for several papers that I've written, and it will be invaluable for writing my dissertation.

Zotero is an open source project that's been around since the mid 2000s.  I honestly don't know how it hasn't been on my radar all of these years.