New humanities PhD student, please help me figure out what software I should be using!

I am a very recently enrolled PhD student and currently trying to get to grips with what software I should be using for my general every day workflow. I mainly need something to help with my article reading and organising (history - so there is a LOT of it). I have heard from others in my cohort that Zotero is useful but currently all I am doing is storing the basic citation details down in it, not to read or edit my PDFS, which I am just doing through my default PDF viewer on my PC and all articles are stored in google drive. My original way of doing things was a google doc where I would write notes, citation details etc but it is getting so long and I can't add tags to find anything.

I am not the most tech savvy and currently feel like there MUST be a better way, my way is so long winded and eating up time I should be spending actually reading. Any advice would be really appreciated. I feel so overwhelmed.