Taking Smart Notes with DEVONthink

Where do you put your ideas?

• Do you take notes just to quickly lose them?
• Do you have trouble finding information you’ve saved?
• Is it hard to come up with ideas for a work or school project, blog post, or research topic?
• Are you tired of having to work from a blank slate?
• Do you have a mess of files you can barely get anything out of?

Build and use your ideas

Whether you're a student, business owner, researcher, office worker, blogger, or hobbyist you've got a lot to deal with.

New information - papers, articles, ideas - shows up faster and faster every day, and in so many ways (PDFs, videos, websites, etc).

• Found a neat article that you want to use in a project?
• Found something else that you totally disagree with?
• Want to throw a receipt somewhere to get it off your desk, but you know it might be important later?
• Just have interesting idea?

What do you do with all this

You could just put it all in a folder, but no matter how carefully you create a folder structure, you may as well say goodbye to whatever you put in it. It can be nearly impossible to find that one cool idea you had. 

You can also improve your search techniques, using keywords and dates, trying to remember what specific words you used or roughly when you saved the file you’re after. But if you can’t quite remember what criteria to search for, you may never be able to find that file, leaving you adrift in a sea of carefully saved yet utterly unnavigable information.

What’s missing in this scenario? 

Discoverability. And that’s where comes in.

Harness the Power of DEVONthink

DEVONthink can help you not only find your files and ideas, but also you weren’t even aware of.

DEVONthink gives you a way to create and find connections between your files, notes, papers, emails, videos, and more. Once you’ve learned how to work with its built-in tools, DEVONthink takes your to the next level.

For example, it can be tough to write a paper or article starting with a blank page. It’s so much easier to write from the seeds of your own ideas. Better yet, DEVONthink can help you gather everything related, even files you didn’t even think of, then lay them all out into a solid structure, so that all you have to do is fill in the gaps.

• Quickly get files, videos, emails, ideas, and more into your system with ease.
• Get to your stuff quickly, whether or not you realized it would be important when you first saved it
• Find new ways to combine and develop ideas you’ve previously worked on
• Reveal connections you didn’t realize existed
• Make it all happen with one of the most powerful file managers, DEVONthink

helps you Once you learn how to make your notes feed and build on each other, using your own thoughts and what you read and watch, taking notes becomes an enjoyable process of exploration and playful discovery.  All the while, you’ll be building a foundation to make DEVONthink work for you, to fully empower not only your digital life but also your creativity.

Programs Used

The book focuses on DEVONthink. Some parts of DEVONthink Pro are included, but most of it focuses on use of the base program. While DEVONthink to Go is discussed, it is not the focus. If you are only using DEVONthink to Go, this book is likely not well suited.

Other programs are discussed but not at all necessary. These include Keyboard Maestro, OmniFocus, TextExpander, and BetterTouchTool.

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