Lol this is so aspirational it could only come from an undergrad.

Let me tell you that I've finally made it to the stressful part of the being a serious "AI" researcher, where I have a real project (as in difficult to achieve goals, not just "turn the crank" stuff) and real deadlines (deliverables on collaborators projects and my own conferences submissions) and the only thing I prioritize above doing the work itself is keeping my advisor (and other collaborators) up to date on what I'm doing so that when he reads my paper draft he's not completely lost. Everything like organizing papers, citations, logging infra, etc is meaningless when you're trying to piece together a solution. Like seriously somedays I barely have time to exercise and eat dinner with my wife (let alone organizing my bookmarks).

For example I'm trying to solve a particular compilers problem using integer programming (note that at a high this isn't that high level because this is a small cottage industry) and so I have like 50 paper tabs open that I bounce between when thinking/experimenting. The way it usually goes is I'll hack, get stuck, go back to the papers, find something, hack, and on. And usually the eureka moment comes some hours later because I connect something.

You might say that I'm a bad researcher but I know for a fact (external validation) that I'm not. And if you look at other highly productive researchers (like TT track profs at my "elite" school) this is indeed how they work. All of this zotero, notion, mlflow stuff is of the ilk of productivity porn for other flavors of knowledge workers (ie a mirage and/or snake oil). Let me put it this way: my advisor is a top 500 h-index person (the exact significance of that metric notwithstanding) and he doesn't have a bibtex of his own papers, let alone zotero for all of the papers he reads/comes across.

The only thing that matters is code/math/etc output (whatever your material output is) and your abilities are also highly correlated with it with the casualty flowing in t opposite direction (make more stuff and you'll get better at making stuff).

But I guess conversely do do some of these things when you're young and have the time (and I don't mean that condescendingly). E.g. reading outside of your area is probably the most valuable (from my own, admittedly a typical, experience, since I jumped domains many times); I very frequently can outpace even my senior colaborators very quickly on understanding a problem and solution simply because when I was younger I dabbled in ... all the things (physics, math, cs).

The other thing that I'll say is there's something obviously missing from this list but only if you've really made it this far: collaborators and interactions with collaborators. The only thing that matters aside from the produce is getting people to make use of it. That means writing, speaking, and getting buyin from your collaborators. If you really truly want to be successful then work on your people skills as it pertains to this area - that means learn to speak the language of your research community, learn to give good (engaging, interesting, useful) presentations, learn to write well (including making nice diagrams), and learn to explain things in ways that smart but busy people will understand. Besides all of this being key to being productive it's also what feeds you (i.e. the real #1 priority) since it gets you jobs, academic and industry.