What is “this?”
What information are you collecting? Your own notes? Materials from other sources? Which ones?
What do you want to do with it? Over what time frame?
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- Maybe Projects - right now I use Omnifocus
- My areas of responsibility - career, professional development, personal responsibilities, family, religion, etc.
- What am I collecting? RSS feeds, PDF’s business/personal, started daily note page - before I was using Logseq, articles on the websites, expense receipts.
- Undecided on Journal page or Note page. Don’t know how to store right now. With Logseq you didn’t have folders.
Note: New to DEVONthink, but after hearing from others on DT Community, this is the right way to go.
Any helpful thoughts, would be greatly appreciated & thank you!
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Two questions to consider when building a system:
Why am I saving this thing?
Under what circumstances will I want to see it again?
Expense receipts and professional development materials are completely different kinds of things. It might be possible to manage them with the same tool, but you shouldn’t assume up front that the same system can or should work for both.
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Right; different kinds of things that I store/organize in Devonthink
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Have you considered the PARA method & the Zettelkasten system?
Is this a joke that doesn’t come across in text? 
It seems @BLUEFROG has indeed considered it, and what you reply to is his conclusion. Or do you mean to ask for more details on his personal approach to using DEVONthink/organizing information?
What have you tried yourself in the past year since you started this thread? What have you learned?
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I am currently using PARA. A good/ok organization tool, but willing to change if someone has organization system that might be a better fit. Looking to the experts for direction.
In regards to Zettelkasten the one feature I implemented is that each note is a concise, self-contained piece of info that captures a single idea or concept. eg atomic note. Linking of notes? I use folders and finder for search.
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Be careful with this. Looking for the “optimal” or “better” solution/system is often a distraction from just doing the work. I can be guilty of this myself 
Either way, it is difficult to help you unless you are more concrete.
As BLUEFROG and others suggest, there is no “One size fits all”. We do different types of work, work in different ways, have different goals, and our own idiosyncrasies.
So pause and think. Take a step back. What goal(s) are you ultimately trying to accomplish? Let your decisions follow from that.
What are you trying to do? What do you need to do that? What are your criteria?
Does your current system satisfy you? If it does, just do the work. If not, what are you unhappy about or what problems do you have? What parts of it do work? This helps both you and others figure out what you could change or what might be “a better fit”.
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Thank you for taking the time to share your valued thoughts.
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I hope you don’t take it the wrong way. I really am trying to be helpful 
We all sometimes get confused and can’t see the forest for the trees. Then it is helpful if other people point it out to us.
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My notes are stored/organized in Devonthink
Tags for organization; minimal folders
Contents are indexed for text search
Notes are interlinked using Devonthink hyperlinks
I’m not into PARA, or Zettelkasten
Each project has a unique tag (Project aaaaaaa)
and all project related notes are assigned the tag
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Did not take it the wrong way, and greatly appreciate your thoughts and wisdom. 
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And just to chime in here…professionally I look at all kinds of systems and methods people bring up. Personally, I don’t use any of them.
These things need to fit psychologically first. They feel intuitive and become second-nature. Often trying to do something the way someone else does it often leads from: excitement about a new possibility –> confusion–> a second wind of excitement as “Let’s try this again!” –> struggle –> frustration –> struggle –> resignation –> finally, abandonment. There’s no harm in that progression and there are times when things suddenly *click* but not usually. The best lesson is to glean things and grab ahold of concepts that do make sense and apply them to your own system.
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I agree and have reached similar conclusions. Though you probably have more to base it on.
For certain things there might be value in a strict, pre-designed top-down system. Mainly for collaboration in a specific context/profession, or where you need to follow a standard. In that case you often don’t have a choice. At least very limited choices.
And it can certainly be helpful to look at what other people do, if nothing else for inspiration. But if it doesn’t resonate with you—if there is too much (psychological) friction—it all just falls apart over time, be that slowly or quickly. In the end you might have more of a mess than when you started.
I take the liberty to pick and choose whatever I want and works for me in the current situation. It is often messy, and because of that DEVONthink’s search is a godsend to me.
At the same time, there might be systems or solutions or approaches that resonate (in part or in whole)—but which you would never have considered or imagined on your own. You simply never developed the mental model for it. So there is value in looking at what other people do. Just don’t let it distract you too much from doing the work.
(For another wrinkle, sometimes friction is a necessary part of a process. Friction or constraints. I’m thinking mainly about creative processes here. If there are no limits, all options open, it can be paralyzing. You don’t know where to start, or what should guide you. But I think that’s a bit outside of what we are discussing here.)
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A very important criterion that I rarely see in threads like this:
Ignorability.
If you completely ignore your system for two weeks, how long will it take to reconnect with it and bring it up to date?
Life happens. Family emergencies, vacations, all-consuming deadlines. All of these can command your full attention unexpectedly. A system that is not resilient against this kind of interruption will fail as soon as confronted with one.
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Kewms, a very very good point!!!
I started creating little cards for myself, for the points in my system where ignorability is critical.
I think automating completely is really unattainable. Yet we all want to have some automation / patterns created. Funny thing, the more automated, the easier to break. In user experience we refer to this as system brittleness.
What Jim and troejgaard commented matches what I learned as a user experience designer 100%.
Using plain text with markdown and jpegs offers the longest survivability and retrieval - yet the tech industry / media trends kind of force us to adopt all sorts of sophistications.
And adopting very highly structured methods kind of create prisons.
Paradoxical.
troejgaard is right. Don’t let organization, Marie Kondo, etc, get in the way of actually doing work. Life is messy, work is messy, and creative work is messiest. The nature of the beast.
Mike (messy guy who learned to put everything in DevonThink databases, and use groups and tags quite liberally)
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One thing that’s nice about Devonthink’s implementation of tags is they can serve as a hierarchy independent from your groups. In fact, you could put all your files in the database’s local inbox and create a tag tree that would serve pretty much identically to a group tree.
You can even have multiple hierarchies of tags. If you decide one of them isn’t as useful as hoped for, the tags can be deleted without losing the files, something you can’t do with groups.
Sometimes I’ll create tags that are just for the moment, sort of ad-hoc subsets for easy access. A tag can also serve as a list of favorites. Kind of nice, too, that a tag can have an annotation. It’s nice to be able to take notes about why things were grouped a certain way.
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I follow Medium.com. I always see posts about Note-Taking apps. eg. Notion, Obsidian, Roam, Logseq, Constella, etc. But? I have never seen a post recommending DEVONthink. 
I have tried them all, and returned to DEVONthink. 
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And we appreciate having you in our circle of friends 
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You and your team are truly the BEST! 
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