So it will, to varying extents, reduce time you spend in any of the following programs:
- Finder
- Preview/PDF Viewer
- Bookmark Manager
- Hazel (automated file management)
- RSS Feed Reader
- iBooks
Everyone's needs are different and my workflow is still a work in progress but I basically run it on similar principles to Inbox Zero. It goes like this:
You have your Global Inbox database which is your in-tray. You then have a bunch of different databases which you could just view as being top level folders. Each of these has its own Inbox. Within each database you can create groups which are basically just folders. You can nest as many as you like. I hope from this description you can see that it is basically like a fancy Finder.
Anytime I find anything on the internet I find interesting I clip it into the global inbox as one of two things (there are more options but these are the ones I use):
- A bookmark if it is just a general site I may want to check out again. I particularly use this for my Coding database for storing useful tools I may want to use at some point.
- A clutter free PDF if it is something I want to read, extract quotes from, annotate etc
DevonThink also adds an Inbox folder to your Finder sidebar so if you have any other files you've acquired throughout the day e.g screenshots you can quickly add these in by dragging them into this folder.
I then make sure that each day I go into the global inbox and move each item into the respective database's inbox (or just the top level of the database if I'm feeling lazy). This way nothing ever gets too out of hand. I have databases for all my broad interests e.g Maths, Coding, Fitness etc as well as a Misc database for everything that doesn't warrant having it's own database.
All of these category databases gets at least an Other folder. This means that, when organising each database I can keep the top level free of files: if I don't know where to file something it goes in the Other folder. Think of it as the junk drawer of the database. Periodically I will go through a database's Other folder and will look to see if any new natural groupings have emerged in which case I will select the files and create a new group for them. Otherwise I'll just leave them as is.
You can also set up smart rules to automate a lot of this for you so you can just tag things as you are clipping or importing them and then DevonThink will automatically move them into the right places for you. You can do much more than this with Smart Rules: for example you could have a script triggered when a file was added that met certain conditions but I don't have any need for this advanced level of control right now. You can also set it up to track RSS feeds and import them if that's your thing.
As well as the category databases I also have a few databases that are organised differently. I have Non-Fiction and Fiction databases which house pdfs organised in folders by author name. These are for general non-fiction and fiction only. Specific subject textbooks and papers live in their respective databases instead. I have an encrypted database for important stuff like insurance details, and I have an Articles database.
The Articles database currently has no groups inside it just PDFs at the top level of any articles I found interesting. By article, I primarily mean blog posts and journalism not (normally) academic papers which tend to be specific enough to add to a category database. If something is obviously category specific like a coding tutorial I will move it into the relevant database. I do not bother with folders in the articles database as I have found it is almost impossible to organise general articles due to them often touching on several different themes and you never know what is going to trigger remembering an article or when or what you will use it for. This is also probably why newspapers resort to using such broad categories like Culture, General Affairs etc. I thus find it better to just have them all at the same level. I may group them into folders by the year I added them into the database if I feel it getting too messy.
I'm not being disciplined enough with myself currently, but what I want to start doing is skimming the newspapers each morning, clip the articles I want to read, and then do all my reading in DevonThink. This way I can highlight and annotate as I go rather than reading in the web browser and going back after the fact and highlighting the parts I found interesting. As you're highlighting you can choose to right click and Add Note to add a specific comment you may want to make. You can then click Tool -> Summarise Highlights -> As Markdown which will generate a file with all the quotations and comments you've made along with app url links to both the general file and the page number of each highlight for easy access.
As well as dragging files and folders into DevonThink you can also index files and folders stored elsewhere, allowing you to keep them in their original location but access them from within DevonThink. You can take advantage of this by creating a new database for your notes and then clicking File -> Index Files and Folders... and selecting your Obsidian vault. You can then use the Quick Finder (cmd-ctrl-m) to move your newly created highlight note into Obsidian for further editing. Or you can just edit the note from within DevonThink using the built in markdown editor. If you add it into Obsidian you can take advantage of block inclusion which allows you to keep the quote in its original file but use it in many other files without having to copy paste and potentially losing track of where something came from. To do this you just start typing ![[filename^ at which point Obsidian will give you a drop down list of sections in the file. You select the part you wish to use and Obsidian will then automatically generate and add a hash that represents that block e.g your markdown text will now look like ![[filename^1js3cj]] and the WYSIWYG editor will display the quote in your new file as if you just typed or pasted it there.
I think by now you can see how you could use this kind of workflow to not only organise all your different bookmarks, files, highlights in one relevant place, but to also use that information to generate your own new content quickly and easily. Having everything organised so well has even more benefits when you want to retrieve something as you have a much better idea of where it is going to be located and can then take advantage of that by doing a search on that specific database rather than having to do an entire file system search from Spotlight/Alfred. DevonThink's search is much better than either of these as it will search the contents of your file not just the filename so if you have no idea about the name of the article but can remember some of the topics it contained you can pretty much always find what you're looking for. You can also use search operators such as AND, OR etc as if you were doing an SQL query if you want to get find grained. There is also an Alfred workflow available so you can type your search queries out lightning fast.
One final thing worth mentioning is another program devontechnologies makes called DevonAgent. This allows you to do searches of many different search engines simultaneously (including academic ones), including deep searches where it will follow links on the pages found to as many levels deep as you set. You can search with boolean and advanced operators such as term1 near\n term2 which will search for term1 with n words of term2. You can also set the program to do these searches periodically e.g every 24 hours if there's a particular field you want to keep up on. You can even get it to send you the results as an email. Once you've got your search results, you can then either open them in the app, in the browser or import any interesting looking articles directly into devonthink.
I should have my new blog finished soon and I may create a post and video or something at some point to go into even more detail but hope this helps in the mean time!