When I started doing all grain I bought Designing Great Beers, and made a bunch of recipes using the formulas. I also put stored many of the equations in a programable calculator. So I have a good idea of what's going on when I use the brewing software.
I tried quite a few and settled on Beersmith. For me it's just the easiest. I don't like it that there is no way to just input mash efficiency. I also don't use all the different mash profiles, I just have one I use for every recipe and change the water to grist ratios and mash temps in each individual recipe. I batch sparge but just leave the sparge settings to continious sparge, because the software kept giving me directions like this "◯ Batch sparge with 3 steps (0.12gal, 3.16gal, 0.91gal) of 168.0 F water".
On brew day I write the recipe into a note book, and keep all my notes. I have three recipe folders in Beersmith, unbrewed, brewed, and a Tried and True.