Organizing Your Ideas with DEVONthink Series (1 of 6) – Introduction

We’ve explored task management before, but now it’s time for idea management:

Taking Smart Notes with DEVONthink helps you to build your ideas, manage your files, and more.

Your creative ideas, references, emails, news feeds, and more can all be gathered and brought into easy reach. Not only that, but when you learn how to leverage DEVONthink, it can help you find inspiration.

Do you have an idea that could relate to 5 other things across your files? DEVONthink has them at your fingertips. Do you want to put a paper together quickly from widely separate notes and references? DEVONthink can do that for you, too.

Taking Smart notes with DEVONthink explores DEVONThink by guiding you through creating a set of powerful personal notes. Rather than re-create the already excellent manual, here we look at a direct practical use. By the time you’ve made your way through, you’ll have a solid system of notes, references, and more importantly, the foundation to make DEVONthink work for you, to fully empower not only your digital life but also your creativity.

Students, teachers, creatives, business professionals, and anyone who wants to hold onto and create ideas as well as deliver them efficiently can benefit.

What’s more, once you have a solid way to build your idea system, exploring can be fun. You can follow your interests, jotting down thoughts knowing you can get back to them when they’re useful, and they’ll stay out of your way otherwise. No more messes of information, sticky notes, and cluttered desktops. Finding and coming up with new ideas becomes that playful productivity we so often search for.

So, today I’m starting off a series of posts to line up with the book’s launch. In this series, we’ll consider the stream of information we need to deal with in our day to day lives, the idea of how we can better take notes, several programs that could be useful outside of DEVONthink, first settings in DEVONthink, as well as a way to create a link to follow up a file in DEVONthink from OmniFocus:

Organizing Your Ideas with DEVONthink Series

1. Introduction
2. The Stream of Information
3. The Note-Box or Zettelkasten
4. The Process of Taking Notes for a Note-box
5. Other Programs Useful for Managing Your Notes
6. Preparing Settings in DEVONthink for WikiLinks
7. Following up DEVONthink files with OmniFocus

Tune in next week…