Bouncing between tools for a year is a strategy, not a failure

It's a frequent problem, especially at the beginning of a research project: resources, planning, and task tools are scattered across different apps, and it feels like we spend a lot of time simply jumping from one tool to another, trying to bring everything together or just stay on top of what's happening.

I actually wouldn't worry about bouncing too much. It's a viable strategy in the first year or two, while you're figuring out which tools suit you, what kind of knowledge capture and processing you like, and what materials you actually work with. For me, the best solution was something tool-agnostic, like .md files, because they open pretty much anywhere and you can keep them locally, where they're easy to back up. If tools change, at least you know you won't lose your information.

To begin with, you may want to pin down what types of information you mostly handle: spreadsheets, videos, images, or just text files. Once you know that, you can start thinking about your end goals: what are you trying to achieve with your organising activity?

I often sketch things out to clarify (just pick up pen and paper) and draw a diagram of how you'll get there with all the data you collect. Once the goals are clear, it's much easier to see which system will organise your materials.

In my own system, I ended up asking AI to write automation scripts that file notes into a folder structure based on my research trajectories, so I always know where to look.

Filed with the good ones,
Zhenia