Files and Piles --- help?

Well, so today was not a thinking-type work day. Luckily, I seem to be at the moment of my projects where I had lots of stuff to download and print, and then piles of stuff cluttering up my little desktop. So I feel like I "made progress" even though that progress was mostly the paper-pushing, non mental type stuff. And I'm afraid I've used up an entire month's worth of busy work and won't have anything the next time I'm tired and can't concentrate.

Anyways, here is where you can help. I have recently been going through a lot of journals and downloading their most recent issues --- you'll remember that I was finding a potential venue for my next (as yet unwritten) article --- and I ran across a lot of things I want to use, save, and/or possibly read someday. I am old and untechnological enough that my dissertation files consist of print articles not pdfs, and I, ahem, "acquired" EndNote but then it stopped working and I just gave up rather than try to update and import all that crap in a second time when I was already halfway through my dissertation.

Plus, there are my "notes&quotes" pages, which are just word documents with all my thoughts and typed in quotations and citations from various dissertation-related books for later use. Those are all saved in a file inside my dissertation file labeled "Notes on Library Books." Clever, eh?

Of course, I don't want to continue saving all my new stuff in a folder deep within a folder labeled "dissertation" as that would soon drive me nuts ---- who would remember where anything is saved? And I don't want to stuff my pdfs into my various project folders and diss-chapter folders because that is a filing nightmare waiting to happen. Will I really remember that the article written by Dude X on Historical Figure Y is saved in my Chapter 2 dissertation folder? In the subfolder labled "Not Used"? Meh.

Ok then, but how should I organize all these file thingys? You tell me.

I've been looking at some programs, because I love to procrastinate by studying anti-procrastination, organizational stuff (I am sick, sick, sick) but there are too many, and I think that all of them do about 2/3rds of what I want them to do and none of them do exactly what I want them to do. So go find me the best one.

There's Bookends, for $99:

http://www.sonnysoftware.com/

There's Sente, for $89:

http://www.thirdstreetsoftware.com/site/introduction.html


There's Papers, which may be too science-oriented to work for my stuff?

http://mekentosj.com/papers/(Although they do have an extended version for the Iphone ... why would I want to work with paper databases on my iphone?)

There's Evernote, which is either free or not-free, depending on whether you want the bells and whistles:

http://www.evernote.com/about/what_is_en/
http://www.zotero.org/

Devonthink seems almost too scarily helpful --- I'm kinda freaked out by the whole "Artificial Intelligence will practically do your work for you" thing.

http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/devonthink/


And Notebook, which seems to have more to-do/organizational stuff than article-managing stuff:

http://www.circusponies.com/


Ok, ok, obviously I got too tired during the making of this post to actually finish it, but whatever. I have the weirdest headache. Go look at some of these products and figure out what the exciting bells and whistles are, or if you use them already, tell me all about them in a highly entertaining way so that I don't have to actually think. Oh, and if you want to organize my files or write a couple articles for me as a way of test-driving the stuff, be my guest!

I think I need to go lie back down now...