#devonthink

Many years ago, toward the end of a staff meeting at Full Sail University, we were being told that we needed to update some software on our company-issued MacBook Pros that we were using for our courses and one of my fellow professors complained, why are they always changing things?! I don’t know that I’d ever heard anyone complain when a tech company upgraded their software or product. It’s…

Lately, as I've been dipping out of PKM, I've also been looking for ways to collate and search across all of my notes regardless of what PKM application they were in. (Ironically, this silo-breaking was supposed to have been avoided entirely with the advent of Markdown but each application still wants their own folder, so you know how it is. You've got to work with it, not against it.)

One application I've used is called DEVONthink. It's an older information manager with a few frustrating quirks but incredibly powerful, and fast. You can import notes into databases, and then you can do whatever you want to these databases. If you're a "classic note-taker" who takes topical notes or downloads copies of source texts in specific folders, their statistical corpus analysis features like Auto Group or Auto Classify do very well.

One experimental database I made in DEVONthink is "groupRef", which was an approach to my time/place/person tagging by using groups/folders and replicants, instead of tags. Instead of attaching tags to each file I put into DEVONthink (which I did in my other database, superRef), I would replicate an imported file across the relevant groups. #mid2021 + #twitter + #Fei would be folders like "mid2021", "twitter", and "Fei". This is a much different approach and, as I expected, created much more visual clutter than I was comfortable with. It became much harder to suppress and focus on the right folders to put each file in.

I don't think I would've been able to us the Auto Classify or the Auto Group features as well as I could have anyway, because the information is just too diverse. Again, DEVONthink works best with topical data--data you can organize into topics yourself. It's great for active researchers who know exactly what they're looking for. And you know, as a person and a user, I could see myself using DEVONthink in the future this way as a cognitive scientist. But that's not the me now. My research today is passive. It's very exploratory. And so, I don't think any kind of classification other than lightweight tagging, which itself is a hard abstraction away from the information, would work as well for me. Certainly, DEVONthink works well for unstructured data--I mean, it has to, it's an information manager--but that data still needs to be relevant and similar to other pieces of data. It needs to share some keywords and lingo. Just as I am, the information I remember often to store permanently are all over the place.

Años atrás, cada fin de semana se sentaba uno con la pila de periódicos y revistas acumulados durante la semana, y armado de un par de tijeras, una libreta y senda jarra de café, se ponía a recolectar via recortes, las noticias y artículos mas importantes.

Hoy la jarra de café continúa, pero las herramientas y las fuentes son distintas: los diarios y revistas llegan digitalizados bajo la forma de PDF's, y los recortes se hacen en el iPadPro, con aplicaciones como Flexcil y DEVONThinkToGo.

Flexcil

Flexcil es una de herramienta maravillosa para editar, anotar, y manipular PDF's. Fácil de usar en el iPad, se convierte en una gran aplicación para quienes realizamos labores de estudio e investigación a partir de dicho formato de documentos.

A partir de un PDF se puede tanto extraer un conjunto de páginas, como una sección del mismo, bajo la forma de una imagen que se puede copiar facilmente al portapapeles, o adicionar como una nota a una libreta digital.

DEVONThink To Go

Hay que pensar en DEVONThink To Go como un gran almacén de contenidos (librería), que pueden venir en múltiples formatos, y pueden ser clasificados fácilmente en categorías y etiquetas que nos ayudarán a encontrarlos rápidamente cuando sea necesario.

En el iPad es muy sencillo integrar a la librería cualquier página web desde Safari, ya sea como un bookmark, web archive, markdown o incluso como PDF. Y lo mismo prácticamente se puede hacer desde cualquier otra app.

El buscador de esta app nos permite localizar cualquier pieza de información (palabra, frase) y usar operadores o filtros para refinar el detalle de los resultados.

Mas información sobre esta gran aplicación la encontrarán en su sitio oficial.

Flujos

Una vez hecho de su conocimiento todo lo anterior, les comparto una imagen que sintetiza el flujo que pueden implementar para hacer sus recortes digitales entre ambas aplicaciones:

Este flujo puede simplificarse aún mas, poniendo lado a lado ambas aplicaciones, y empleando drag-and-drop para almacenar el recorte.

TIP

How I Work Right Now (June 2020)

I’m always interested in reading how people work, what type of workflows they have. It’s probably because for so long I felt like I didn’t really have one or the ones I tried didn’t stick with me too long. Now I know why that was the case but it deserves its own post (spoilers: it was undiagnosed ADHD).

Since I’ve been redoing almost all of my workflow, I also wanted to write about it. Not just…

Omnifocus and DEVONthink a Productivity System

Often when I see productivity or a productivity system mentioned it is mentioned in the context of an app like a Task Manager or something like Notion which can be many things such as a task manager, Notes taker, wiki or even a spreadsheet. Notion is a good example of where I’m going with this article.

A productivity system, at a minimum, involves a task manager and a Notes keeping system that…