I’m trying to figure out if DEVONThink is for me or not.
I’m looking a place to store all my stuff. Bill’s, Web Clippings, Project support files,… I don’t need it to store email as Gmail does that for me. I’m a business owner who is getting his life organized. I’ve been following the methods of GTD for about a year now.
Pros:
–Using DT for about a week now and love the way it integrates with OSX. Have a bookmarklett setup to clip pages right into DEVONThink
–While some don’t like the interface, I find it very clean and easy to use.
–I already own a SnanSnap
–Email right from within DT
–Update and edit files from within DT
–Stores files as files, not like Evernote were it’s in their format or nothing.
Cons:
–Access to my files, I used to have a simple file structure laid out and stored with Dropbox. This way I could access all my files from anywhere
–Don’t see a use for the DT AI in my workflow.
The Access to my files is the big one for me. I’m not sure I’m ready to give up my “DropBox” I use it all the time and love it.
So is DT overkill for what I’m trying to do. Does anybody know of a simpler solution?
You can still keep your files outside of DevonThink, and just index instead of import the files. Will allow you to search etc, and still access files outside.
For files you update often, and that is unsupported by DT, if is the real solution. I am still trying to figure out the balance.
One thing to remember though, is that you can get to the files inside the DT database. Right click and show package contents, and you are in. But they are stored in a different structure than the originals and are difficult to find without searching.
I’m not understanding why you discounted the AI as something that doesn’t fit your workflow. I find the filing AI to be a big time saver. I scan in things when they hit my desk… usually immediately. Because DTPO search is so powerful, I generally don’t file until I’ve accumulated a hundred or so things to file. When I sit dow to do this, I use the little “magic hat” filing sidebar. I find that this is a quick piece of work because of the power of the AI. The quality of search and this AI has led me to stop renaming my files… I just leave them with the DTPO assigned date/time stamp and have no problem finding things. If you are business owner, you have a lot of stuff going on, and this renaming and filing thing I found takes a huge amount of my time for no real benefit.
For access, have you looked at the web interface to DTPO? Will that do what you want?