Scrivener.
A thousand times over. A must have if you do writing. It's hard to put into words exactly how much Scrivener has done for me and my writing, but it's completely revolutionized things for me. No more am I sorting things into dozens (literally) of documents and then searching frantically through them until I find what I need. No, I can just make one Scrivener binder and then make a folder for the drafts, a folder for research, and then make a subfolder for characters, and then subfolders in that subfolder, and on and on.
(For example, an old folder of mine contains 11 different word documents of backstory, because I split things up by what it's about. If I need to find one piece of info I'd have to open all 11, and that's painful; in Scrivener, you just open the document and flick through all your scrivenings, no need to have billions of windows open.)
It's not just good for fiction writing, either, even though that's what I primarily use it for. I used it to write an academic report once and it was beautiful; I had, as mentioned above, a big folder for research, a folder for drafts, and a folder for final "chapters". I loved being able to add whole HTML and PDF files to my research because that let me have access to the original research in Scrivener, rather than tabbing between apps to copy and paste what you need. It's so advantageous.
I could keep going on and on, but I'll refrain. But still, for any kind of writing where you're working with lots of research and need to keep it really organized? Scrivener is just a steal at its price.
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