I use Evernote for almost everything at this point.  On the work front, I'm using it to keep track of design decisions and brainstorming (including images of the whiteboards), take notes in meetings, track my to-do lists for everything, and keep a list of readings and technologies to follow up with (to name a few).  On the personal side of things, I keep track of other to-do lists, travel information, recipes, and my grocery list.

Evernote is also Free, though there are some bonuses for those willing to get the premium account, and I find it is well worth it.

Evernote is also extensible, and a number of 3rd party developers have put together some pretty neat solutions.  My favorite at the moment is EgretList for the iPhone.  EgretList is a to-do list manager that pulls in anything that has a checkbox from your Evernote library into a set of easily organized to-do lists that can be grouped by urgency, location, project, or whatever you can think of. 

More often than you realize as an academic, you will be representing data or other information. This might come in the form of a simple table, a straightforward graph, or a more elaborate visualization of data. Visualization of information is an incredibly difficult and yet outstandingly important task to focus on doing correctly. Not only does a good visualization convey information more clearly, but also in many cases more accurately.

One of the gurus of information visualization is Edward Tufte who has published a number of incredibly informative and stunningly beautiful books on the subject. I highly recommend that you check out his books. He also has an insightful, critical short work that examines the challenges of using Powerpoint effectively.

For a constantly updated stream of complicated and beautiful visualizations, I also like to follow http://infosthetics.com/.

Finally, if you know you need a beautiful and informative visualization but don’t have the skill-set on-hand to create one yourself, I highly recommend you contact Chris Fink at Protagraphics.

My recommendation, therefore, is that you attend to these! Furthermore, if you can come up with your own tags and categories to organize your materials, it will be incredibly helpful down the road. Having keywords in your reference manager, notebooks, and filing cabinets can be the difference between spending 2 minutes to find a few key articles, or spending hours looking for that one paper you are sure you read 5 years ago. In all of your writing, if you have an idea of what the big categories are that it will be linked to, it will help you shape your argument, experiment, ideas, etc. even if those aren’t the exact tags or keywords that you use in the end. The goal here is to use the concept of a tag, in any form, to organize and position your work effectively.

There are many other tools that also let you post information and / or follow the information that your friends and colleagues are posting, including blogs and facebook.  I currently use all 3 (you can see the twitter feed I use to discuss my courses: here ). Furthermore, the importance of all of these social networking tools are discussed widely by many knowledgeable people, so I won’t reproduce that here. I will however offer three suggestions that I believe bear repeating:

1. This is a great way to find out information about a host of academic topics and researchers. However, be careful that you don’t limit yourself to these sources as there are still many important sources of information out there that you don’t want to overlook.
2. Think very carefully about your audience–both the people who will be following you, and those who won’t–when you post things.
   1. The people following you: I am often amazed at the things that people will say using a service like Twitter because it seems that they forget that their audience now includes their colleagues and professors and not just their friends. I’m not offended easily, but sometimes an incredibly unprofessional comment by someone in a social networking site does change my opinion of them, both for the better and the worse.
   2. The people not following you: Popular as they may be, these technologies are not being used by everyone. In my case, this means that I need to support alternative methods of notification when tweeting about my courses because not all of my students are on twitter. Depending on the kind of information that you are sharing, and the frequency with which you share it, this might turn out to be a rather large consideration.
3. Finally, I remind us not to over-use these tools simply because they are available and / or popular. Each of these tools has, like any other technology, very real and distinct affordances and constraints that influence the way that people use them, and how they can support activity. In the rush to use the newest most popular technology, I hope we won’t forget these basic principles of design.

In short, I remain a critical technophile in that I see some incredible potential to these kinds of technologies, but also want to make sure they are being used in thoughtful ways.

Legaleze
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They take a bit of a beating in my pocket, but that	I wish I knew how this bizarre set of doodles led to the design on the right (from BeeSign), but I know that jotting it down like this was crucial.	This is how the flower ultimately looked in BeeSign. (1)

(1) It is also important to note that Chris Fink of Protagraphics played a central role in helping me translate my ideas into the final design of BeeSign and improving upon them in the process.

Incidentally, if you are already using Zotero, you can use Zotero to grab citations for any articles that I have a PDF for simply by viewing the page on which they are listed.