Addition to my previous posts… I didn’t mean to imply that Bill’s workflow is always inefficient. I wanted to say that it can depend on what one is doing.
(Confusing posts is my speciality 
)
Quite understood. 
When I’m working on a project I spend much more time reading and thinking – and writing – than in doing “mechanical” operations in my database.
Which means that improvement in my performance will be magnified more if I think better, than if I improve my mechanical procedures. That usually pays off. When things slow down, I try to rethink what I’m doing.
My little tricks for associating notes to references, tying a note to a specific location in a PDF or RTF reference, and so on, might seem slow and roundabout. But in fact they let me plod along in my thinking without slowing it down. Yes, I could save a few seconds in some of those mechanical operations such as devising a reference link, if there were a more direct approach. I’ll take advantage of improved operations as they come along. But most of the time, I’m not doing “assembly line” work, repeating mechanical operations as quickly as possible. I’m multitasking, so saving a few seconds or minutes here and there via faster mechanical operations doesn’t really make a significant difference in getting the project done.
If my database job were a clerical one, repeating operations by the thousands as quickly as possible, I would be pleading for ways to accomplish those operations as quickly as possible. But that’s not the kind of job I would willingly take, unless I were starving. I wouldn’t take a job, for example, to tag every one of the more than 150,000 items in my various databases with keywords, especially because that wouldn’t significantly increase the efficiency of what I actually do in a database. But if DEVONthink comes along and offers to make some tagging operations simple and useful, I’ll try to figure out how to make that work for me.
What I love about DEVONthink is that it’s rich enough that I can usually figure out an approach that will let me do what I need to do, and that approach then just becomes part of the background of getting the project done.
While I’ve been writing this, I’ve been watching three deer grazing outside my cabin window on a sunny, crisp and frosty morning. Multitasking, indeed.
Hi Bill,
I totally agree with your post: there should be room for experimenting ways of accomplishing whatever one has in mind. Creativity and ability to find the right solution.
THX
PS. I am still waiting to see an exemplum of a database with some of your implementation (links, note taking etc.)
I do a bit of both… first, some tagging to understand my data set into research categories, and then some thinking about what emerges. That’s not tagging by the thousands, but by the hundreds usually. Now, a lot (a shitload actually) of applications can assist by convenient tagging, but then when it comes to support the thinking about the data…
As promised earlier, here’s an example database that illustrates how I associate notes with each other and with a referenced document. It’s a DT Pro 1.x database, but tips are included for using cue strings and tabs under DT Pro 2.0 if it’s converted to a DT Pro 2.0 database. I frequently use the Cornell Notes format for my rich text notes, and a template for that is included in the database, as well.
It runs about 4 MB, as I included an old environmental exchange project paper dating back to 1993 – the scanned and OCRd PDF of the paper accounts for most of the database size.
The title of the database is Example Database - Associating Notes.dtBase.zip
I think this link to my public folder will work: homepage.mac.com/WebObjects/File … US&lang=en
Thank you. I am trying the database!
And thanks for your picture!
Thanks, Bill. I had intended to look at the database, but forgot amid the crush of daily life recently.
Amusing (when you intended) and very, very interesting. I have a greater appreciation now for the versatility of the RTF format, seeing how nicely the Cornell format works throughout the database. I also have a good appreciation for your cabin, and Brown County looks very nice 
I lived in Wood County, Ohio, for a couple years (2003-2006), and liked much of Indiana when driving out here this summer. (I still, however, hate Gary)
Thoughts (or “Thought,” as I found out would be more accurate after staring at this post form for a while):
- I’d like to see (someday) a command to quickly take a sectioned screenshot (similar to Cmd+Shift+4) and have it imported into the database. Like you, I abhor marking up my references, but frankly I’d like to have those references be cut down into as specific a form as possible.
[list]
[*] One added feature would be if the “copy” was actually in PDF format – in other words, if I could copy the image layer of the PDF and the text layer at the same time. I’m not sure if that is possible – but it would make the specific reference light and very portable, and the general reference only a click or two away (through Lookup or through See Also). I’m curious about whether the devs think this might be possible someday. - If I moved my (large!) references into a separate database, and could move snippets into my primary database, it would make it that much easier to backup and manage the primary database, and Lookup might still work to return the larger document in my References database. I think that would be fantastic.
[/*:m][/list:u]
Interesting DT example. If posts were rated , this would would be 5* .Thanks