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I do a lot of research, so the point about organizing notes is important to me. The simple truth is that everyone has their own way of doing it, and you have to find your own way.
What I do is to take notes: once on a separate sheet of paper, now - of course - as a Word document. Sometimes these are very detailed: I note the page number, I copy out some passages directly, I summarise others. I'll sometimes write one or two thousand words of notes on an interesting book. The advantage of doing this on a PC is that you can then do a word search. It also means that my current PC has detailed notes on 1,500 texts.
When I'm writing, I spend about 80% of my time just referring to my notes. If I want to include a direct quotation, I can just cut and paste. For really tricky points I need to go back to the original texts. This is one of the few times where paper books still beat e-books: it's easier to have a paper book next to me, open at the right page, than to open up the programme for reading ebooks. Also, I can have 3, 4 or 5 paper books open at the same time, while with ebooks I can only really have one at a time.
Anyway, those are my work secrets. As the Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World) used to say: organise, organise, organise.
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