Evernote is wildly popular among people concerned with being more productive in information-focused jobs. I use it. You should try it out because:

1. tags and notebooks make research searchable, searchable means findable, and findable means ‘not wasting your time doing the research’;

2. optical character recognition means you can search for keywords among your hand-written notes – take a photo of your notes;

3. audio notes can be tagged and made searchable;

4. archive pdfs, web pages (use evernote clipper) and sketches (use skitch).

5. share notes by making them public.

Handy notes on using evernote for better productivity.