How do you organize your genealogy research?

Maybe the Board was just a little slap-happy after our almost 3-hour meeting today, but we decided to make this month's blog poll on how we organize our genealogy notes. We're most curious to see your answers...and read what you have to say about this topic.
Karen Sipe and I had hoped to spend some significant time talking about organization in the Beginning Genealogy class we taught during the Fall Seminar. Unfortunately, we ran out of time and barely gave the topic lip service. For this I apologize. We had hoped to talk about organizing files or notebooks by surnames, locations, time....there are as many ways to organize family history research as there are researchers, I suspect.
Personally, I've tried color-coded files, surname notebooks, and boxes by family line [with separate file folders inside], but somehow I always get too busy to file and end up with piles...and piles....and piles. If I'm lucky, I can figure out where a particular piece of paper I'm looking for is by how deep it is in the pile, but that hasn't been happening much lately. It's obviously time to get organized...again.
I'm thinking I might just wait until I hear what Elissa Powell, our Spring Seminar speaker, has to say on the subject. One of her four presentations will be "Twenty Years of Stuff. Now What Do I Do?" I'm hoping she's got some simple solution for my piles!
Please share your thoughts by taking the poll [column to right] and/or sharing your comments [click on green word "comments" below].