The tools I use at work

Evernote

2015.04.17 - Paul Minors - A Tour of My Evernote Account
- He highly recommends a book called "Evernote Essentials" by Brett(?) Kelly(?), a former employee at Evernote.
- It looks like a simpler version of Confluence. The main thing it seems to be missing is the ability to create complex hierarchies between pages ("notes" in Evernote). Evernote's "Notebooks" can't contain content, so they seem most analogous to Confluence's "Spaces".
- The general organization philosophy seems to be more "Gmail" than "Wikipedia".
- You can create links between notes. Not sure if they update automatically if you rename a note.

A huge downside to Notepad is that it doesn't save a copy of your draft (unsaved work), so if your computer crashes or gets restarted for some reason, you'll lose everything in your notepad file that wasn't saved. With Notepad++ it seems to keep a saved copy of your draft after every keypress.
Another problem with Notepad is it's extremely-limited 'Undo' functionality.
The main thing about Notepad++ that I think makes it better than Sublime Text for simple text notes is that it starts up instantly. Sublime Text has a surprisingly long start-up time.
Another big advantage that Notepad++ has over Sublime Text 2 is the speed with which regex find-and-replace operations are completed. They're significantly faster with Notepad++.

The big problem I have with Notepad++ is that it's not as beautiful as Sublime Text 2: the default UI is packed full of icons and buttons and sidebars and too many colors, and the default file icons are too colorful / busy.
- You can fix this fairly easily if you know what settings to change.
The scrollbar is slightly wider than the one on Notepad, which I don't like.

The recommended settings below are for using Notepad++ as just a better version of Notepad (i.e. for keeping notes), and not as a code editor.
Change Notepad++'s file icon to the default Notepad one, because the Notepad++ file icon is too colorful / busy.
- https://superuser.com/questions/144125/use-windows-default-icon-with-notepad
Change the font to Calibri (what Word uses) or Consolas (what Notepad uses)
Hide autocomplete suggestions: https://stackoverflow.com/a/22635911/4115031

Enable "Wrap around" so that it will search the entire document and not just the portion of the document that comes after where your cursor is located.