Tools I'm Using 2.0

Back in May and June of last year, I wrote a series of posts on the organization, writing, and research tools I'm using for my doctoral work. I've since winnowed that list down a bit and revised some of my processes. Since it's the time of the term when students are finishing up finals and perpetually looking ahead to next term to see what they can do better, this seemed like a good time to take you on the guided tour. As always, I'd love to hear other suggestions or provide clarification - shout that stuff out in the comments.

Organization

Only a couple of tools from the list have actually survived. I really loves me some plain 'ol pen-and-paper for todo lists and other random scrawlings. I still think Remember the Milk is an excellent tool; I just find the paper method so familiar and flexible that that's what I tend to stick to.

• Google Calendar is still my go-to. Everything, but everything, goes on there. (Ok, not work appointments, because Groupwise still doesn't talk to Google securely, but everything else.) Since I use Thunderbird for my school email, I've added the Lightning and Provider extensions so that I don't have to leave my email to schedule stuff. It's particularly helpful because Google Calendar allows sharing, so my significant other and I can see one another's calendars, as well as the ones for various community groups I work with.
  
• Evernote has become more and more my electronic brain. I keep webshots, emails, copies of documents, anything and everything I might need to refer to again. Because the tagging in Evernote is so flexible, I can search for things easily and quickly. Helpful when I'm digging for that-one-newspaper-article-about-that-one-thing-I-wanted-to-include-in-that-paper...

Writing

This one has changed enormously. It's a much shorter list now, as I've filtered down to just the tools that are most helpful to me and let the others go.

• MS Office for Mac is still the ubiquitous tool. I had just pulled together the templates I needed for APA format in Open Office when the APA flipped to the 6th edition this summer. Still haven't taken time to recreate the new templates in Open Office, so I'm limping along on the ones in Word. Drat.
• Open Office is still a favorite tool to write in for all of the original reasons I liked it. Easy to use, free, has fantastic word prediction. Now, if I could just get those templates put together...
• Vue not only does great mind mapping, you can attach objects (documents, images, web addresses, etc.) to each of the nodes, then create a presentation that's completely non-linear out of it. So fun.
• MacSpeech Dictate was just recently purchased by the maker of its speech recognition engine, Dragon Naturally Speaking. Since Dragon is, by far, the more developed of the two programs, I'm really looking forward to the enhancements that could come out of it. Dictate is a huge help in working with large blocks of quoted (or noted) text; I've also used it to transcribe interviews from my Livescribe Pulse pen.

Research

This set actually hasn't changed much, but there are some new features in the tools I use. I'll highlight those.

• Zotero is still one of my absolutely favorite tools. With the addition of collaborative groups, syncing, formatable notes, and the new Word for Mac plug-in, I'm just a happy, happy camper. Zotero makes bibliographic management a snap.
• Skim doesn't currently have any shiny new features, but it's still rock-solid and handles PDFs like a champ. Read to me, Skim, so that I'll actually pay attention through those lengthy and complex sentences composed of multiple polysyllabic words.
• Mendeley does have shiny new features! The one-click web importer is downright simple, and collaborative annotations make Mendeley more and more a social research tool.
  
• Delicious, Google Reader, and Wikitap are still in my well-beloved-and-well-used list.