For a while now I’ve played around with using Devonthink as a story planning tool.
Some things appear multiple times in an outline. McGuffins, characters, locations, and each time they appear there is something to note about them for consistency’s sake.
I write notes in Devonthink RTF documents. This is my inventory of thoughts.
The ones that pertain to Chapter 1 get tagged “Chapter 1.”
Any one of those notes for Chapter 1 might get tagged “Chapter 19,” too. Additions to those notes, either as annotations or edits while writing chapter 1 are there while writing chapter 19.
While writing chapter 1, I drill into the Chapter 1 tag with a double-click, so all I see are those few notes that matter.
I generally tag not by writing the tag on the docs but rather creating the tag tree first. Then, I tag by dragging the documents on to the tags. I’m more of a visual drag and drop person.
Very interesting indeed! You use tags much in the same way I use groups. Replicants make tags and groups nearly interchangeable.
But only nearly interchangeable. Your video and discussion here suggest to me that I would find it useful to review the DevonThink documentation and think about ways I can be using tags more effectively.
By the way, I watched the video this afternoon on YouTube, and came here to post it, only to find you’d done it first!
Really nice video - I have used DT3 forever but your use case is very different from mine and that helps me to see how you use tags very differently than I do.
Thanks, @rkaplan! The cool thing about tags is they can fit multiple purposes, even within the same database. Best of all, tagging can arise order from chaos without losing the original chaos.
I have a financial database for receipts, bills, statements, and contracts, grouped in the expected categories based on bank accounts and vendors. When I pay a bill, I tag it with something like “Paid-21-11-19 Fri,” Which is a child tag of Paid-21/Paid-21-11. That gives me a second date stamp on the entry.
Another tag called Attn goes on bills that get scanned but haven’t been paid.
I could do those things with annotations, but tags make it much easier to browse.
It’s tags only for me; vendors, budget categories, bank accounts
Another tag called Attn goes on bills that get scanned but haven’t been paid.
Most of my bills are auto-payment
I store the payment date as subject date (prefixed to the record name)
For bills requiring action on my part, I flag them for task management
by specifying a task due date (custom metadata field)
Tasks are tagged as completed, and get a completed date/time stored as a comment in file comments