Devonthink. My new junk drawer!

DEVONthink Scenarios
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I couldn’t find it again, but there was an item on the forum about not using DEVONthink just as a dumping ground, a junk drawer for everything, which I kind of agreed with, and practised. I consider myself a bit OCD. Everything for me has to have a place. I have two databases, one for work and one personal, and I would keep the global database as a temporary place, then occasionally I would clean it out, file things away into the work or personal database or delete unwanted stuff.

The recent events in the Middle East have changed that way of thinking. I had a flight from Bangkok back to the UK, but all flights, of course, were suspended, and I couldn’t get back through Dubai. I had to do two things, quickly, as I had to get back to the UK for work on a specific day, so no dilly-dallying!

1. Find another flight going a different way back to the UK, avoiding the UAE, and get me back on time.

2. Apply for a refund for the cancelled flights.

I spent almost 5 hours trying to find flights. This involved lots and lots of screen-grabbing from websites of prices and times. Yes, I could have bookmarked the sites into DEVONthink, yes, I could have created a pdf into DEVONthink using the browser extension, I know all about that, let me tell you, though, when things are changing quickly as they were, ie the availability of flights and the prices were changing by the second, the quickest way was just to do a CMD/SHIFT/3 and grab stuff to the desktop sharpish…

By the time I had finished, I had 12 screenshots on my desktop of the chosen flights, times and prices, and because it was done through a broker, I had a combination of the broker’s website and the carriers, so I could cross-check just to make sure that I had the flight at the right price, at the right time from the right place.

So what? Where does DEVONthink come in?

I grabbed all the screenshots and dropped them into my DEVONthink inbox. OSX screengrabs are labelled ‘screenshot-xxxx’ etc. I have no idea what screenshot was what. So I selected them all, then went to Chat (top right) and in the prompt I put:

“Analyse, rename and change the file name of the selected items”

I use a Claude API. Within seconds, all of the screenshots have been renamed to make sense. (I did check them to make sure they say what they are.)

Next, I selected the newly named items again, and in the Chat prompt, I put :

“Analyse and provide a detailed summary of the selected items.”

Again, very quickly, I got a very nice summary of all the flights that I booked, with times, etc., in a nice table. Listing reference numbers, baggage allowances on each leg, it even reminded me about visa requirements with a link to the immigration office in China to do an online visa application.

Applying for a refund from Emirates was a big challenge. Again, lots of screenshots and online chats. The online chats are transcribed and automatically emailed to me, which I then export from Apple Mail as a pdf, drop it in the DEVONthink inbox with all the Emirates screenshots.

Again, I got chat to change the screenshot names into something I could understand. Then I asked for a summary. This part was amazing. I got a full timeline of the refund application with a brief summary of who said what to whom, and how the refund was confirmed in a nice little conclusion. This is very, very handy going forward if there is a dispute with the refund.

Ok, so these two examples probably mean nothing to some, nothing complex or sophisticated is going on here, but it has proved that I should keep everything, and that I should stick it all in DEVONthink! Devonthink has become that drawer where everything is thrown into. The junk drawer!

My trip back to the UK is complicated. The refund is messy, now I have two folders in my global inbox, one for the travel and one for the refund, with a labelled single file in each that is a summary of everything in that folder, which is now in my favourites for a quick grab.

Simple but useful.

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Interesting. And a lot of more safest than using the new cli AI interfaces, that can make a disaster in your own filesystem.

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As much as I love DT, I put all my travel documents (flights, trains, notes, hotel reservations) in Lambus. Nicely attached to the cities I’m visiting.

But then I haven’t been in a scramble to rebook since the volcano in Iceland interrupted international air traffic 20 years ago.

Perhaps. Or your nice AI-generated summary is later read by an AI that simply refuses to recognize it because it’s not an original…

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Nice use case! And welcome back to the U.K.!

I try not to think of my DEVONthink as a junk drawer, but it sort of is. I use folders within my databases and everything gets filed, but I do collect a lot of stuff, e.g. all my emails get filed, even silly ones I should probably just delete (largely because it costs little time or storage to file them).

But it’s not a junk drawer because everything has its place :joy: (I don’t have a junk drawer in my house either, as everything has a location :rofl:) It’s more like the warehouse at the end of Indiana Jones. Everything’s filed nicely on shelves, but bad news if you want to find something and you’re not the warehouse manager.

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Define “junk”, LOL.

The advice “don’t make it a junk drawer” is not useful. E.g., I have years and years of receipts in the same group in DEVONthink – maybe 15 years worth. I don’t care, because each receipt is about a seller, on a date, doing something defined. Three factors that are very easy to search. Is that group a junk drawer? Nope. Not as long as a powerful search feature can find what I want everytime I want something.

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