I find that my DT organization – or the way I approach it – leaves a lot to be desired. I use lots of groups that make certain types of entries easy to find. For example, Technology Receipts, Income from Art Sales, etc.
But I also come across lots of things that are of interest to me that I throw into DT in order to either read later or to come back to because they’re good references. The problem is, I forget about them. I realized this when I recently hunted for something for the third time in a couple of years that I had put into DT a couple of years ago.
I’m sure that I’m not the only one who does this and I’m wondering whether other DT users have figured out strategies for dealing with this type of situation.
Increasingly I realize that the only things that has to be meticulously categorized in DT are those needed for legal/professional reasons like some case you are working on for a client- in those cases, the only solution is to assign the appropriate group or tag immediately after importing the item into DT3.
But beyond that, as long as the item is OCR’d for full-text search, DT3 is extremely capable of finding what you need via its search capabilities - your efforts may be best focused on learning the nuances of how to do a search within DT3.
Extending it further, Foxtrot Professional Search is a wonderful complement to DT3 which can search within your existing DT3 database.
I have (had?) this problem and use smart groups for this. I tend to add PDFs to a large folder called ‘Library’ with subgroups for Primary and Secondary stuff. These both are huge (+1000 and +3900 files). So the Library folder now contains some smart groups, ‘Added this Week’, ‘Added this Month’, ‘Added this Quarter’. That’s an easy way to get to stuff I knew I added, wanted to read last month, but have forgotten details of but life got in the way. Lots of ways to tweak those smart group along whatever criteria you fancy (e.g. kind, tag, or whatever else helps). I stick to ‘date added’ since my needs are relatively simple.
Just as a potential idea, consider implementing a bunch of smart groups targeting your potential “areas of interest” (see/research more about “para” e.g. here or elsewhere)
This is how it might look (indeed depending on your interests and topics):
If all your data is OCRed, DT is really great in finding all these insights.
Another idea is to combine search terms e.g. - the more specific they are, the greater results you will get
Last but not least, you can use the cool “words Cloud” view in the inspector to get inspiration - just select a folder/group to see which words are being picked up by the software.
