Significant changes to apps and final 2021 workflow

I’m honored! :slight_smile:

Along with others, the time and detail you’ve put int this is very generous. Thank you.
The flowchart itself for me is educational in that it I tried to put my workflow into a mind map, or any organisational process, I think I’d struggle.

So that’s my weekend project … develop a workflow I can explain (if only to myself!)

Thanks again!

3 Likes

Thanks for the kind words. This is a wonderful forum full of helpful and gracious people. It is my only “social media” activity.

I’m glad to know that I gave you something “enjoyable” to do over your weekend. Ha! :slight_smile:

Thanks again!

5 Likes

Interesting point about Studio One. How has your transition been? I’ve dabbled in Studio One in the past. One reason was because on the face of it some of the workflows seem quite inviting compared to Logic. Same goes for Ableton, but having had invested so much time in Logic prior, the only way I was able to make Ableton work for me was to consciously set aside a few weeks where I exclusively forced myself to do everything I’d do in Logic in Ableton instead. So I’m curious if your experience with Studio One has been similar.

I’m a total amateur/dabbler with these apps, so I can’t speak with any authority.
But for me the transition was simple as the drag and drop nature of S1 makes getting going quite simple.
I miss the drummers in Logic, but I use Melodyne a lot and that’s more important. Plus, I’m being pushed to learn to program drumming which is fun.

Oh, and most of what I do is producing songs that my wife writes using Notion on her iPad, and that integration is a huge time saver.

I’d say that unless there is a feature that is truly going to be a game-changer for you (like Notion integration and, to a lesser extent, Melodyne for me), stick with what you know.

How happy are you with insync to work with Google documents in DEVONthink ?
I am looking for a good solution

Extremely happy! It solved the one point of friction in my workflow, putting stuff in DT natively and having it sync to Google folders that are INDEXED in DT. It works flawlessly.

This whole thread is a great read, and thanks for sharing so much of your workflow with us.

I keep going back and forth between using DT and just storing everything in a a folder structure accessed through Finder. Certainly there are some things that just work better in Finder while others (such as a more organized project) work better in DT, and DT is in many ways a better Finder than Finder.

The thing is that I don’t really want to have two separate systems, where now I will add the cognitive effort of a) figuring our whether a given file or project or set of information more properly belongs as a folder in Finder or a group in DT, and b) remembering where I wound up putting something later on.

Ideally I could solve that problem via just organizing my DT database around indexed folders instead of importing (there would still be a subset of documents that would lend themselves only to being imported, such as a a huge number of references in PDF format that work well as a DT database).

Because essentially all of my files are stored in two Folders and their descendants and are synced between my Mini and Air via SynologyDrive, the problem of syncing files across systems is handling reasonably well.

I do not want to give up the use of the Finder, I should note, in part because I have a very extensive system of file renaming and filing based on Hazel rules and Finder tags, including some custom utilities that allow me to direct files to various places in the folder system dynamically via the tags, that I think would be difficult or impossible to recreate in DT.

My three areas of difficulty:

  1. When I create a file in Finder or from a specific app into an indexed folder, it should appear in that indexed folder in DT, which presumably means reindexing the folder. I presume I could create a DT rule triggered by selecting an indexed folder that would trigger it to reindex to handle this automatically. Whether I can create a rule that propagates down a folder tree (so that the rule does not have to be attached to every folder in a tree individually I don’t know (yet).

  2. If I create a new document in an indexed folder in DT, I would want that to appear as a file in the folder, not as a DT internal document. I have not been able to find a way to make this occur, however, which means that the folders as represented in DT are not in sync with the folders in Finder.

  3. I have not (yet) testing if DTTG will show and download files that are in indexed folder. This would be crucial as I do need access, albeit not frequently, to my files on the go. While the SynologyDrive app on iOS/iPadOS is not the best app in the world, it works well enough to meet my needs.

If anyone knows the answer to / has solutions to these issues, I would appreciate hearing about them.

2 Likes

Just a quick response: DEVONthink 3’s indexing works as you’d hope for all three of those points. DTPO used to be a little more unreliable. I recommend trying the setup you describe with DEVONthink 3 and DTTG if you already own each app.

I am very much interest in 2. Not sure if it works that way but I have not tested it. Can someone confirm if this works, as in, if I create a file in a index folder in DT, that file is also created in the file system.

Yes, see my comment immediately above!

1 Like

I have come to the same conclusion. I don’t write for the web and the mental overhead I had to use to force the kind of writing I do (academic and research writing) into a Markdown context was counterproductive and inefficient. Now I really need to try out Scrivener.

1 Like

Scrivener is awesome! But be warned, it has nearly, not quite, the same level of complexity and learning curve that DT requires. :slight_smile: But with that complexity comes great power. The same is true, to a lesser extent, with programs such as OmniFocus.

1 Like

Rediscovered last week that deep links in Apple Reminders now works both on iOS & macOS. First I discovered it in iOS 13, but then deep links wouldn’t sync to macOS and vice versa. For example, if you in drafts and have focus on a specific draft, you can say to Siri remind me about this, and you will get deep link icon in Apple Reminders. In Apple Reminders you have both note field and url field. I find it very useful because when I used OmniFocus, I usually putt deep links to other sources. Now I can actually use note field for notes and url field to link to other sources.

Sometimes powerful tools add an unnecessary layer of complexity, which will affects your productivity negatively.

For the most I need checklists with the ability to jump between different lists, and I’m enjoying doing it in Drafts, specially with wiki links. If something need to be reminded of, I will add reminder respectively to Reminders app.

This is also nice because if one uses OF or Things, anything in Reminders can be automatically imported into OF or Things.

I’m still experimenting a bit with my note taking process. I was settled on the process using Craft until I purchased the new M1 MBP. The battery life is so good that I find myself using it more than my iPad, which is a change because when using the MBP taking notes in DT is no longer a pain. :slight_smile: Although DTTG v3 is better, it is still not a nice note taking experience. Using the MBP solves this problem.

The other nice thing about this approach is that I can drag and drop an email from Apple Mail into a DT note and a link is automatically created. Also, DT has robust cross-linking so while I’m typing a note in DT I can type [[ name of file]] and a link is automatically created to that file. If a file by that name does not exists, DT creates the file with that name. At this point I have every resource I need for every project in one central place—DT—which is also synced to both iCloud and Google Drive.

I also discovered that in addition to copying/pasting an OF link into DT, I can also just drag the OF task into the relevant DT note and the link is created. This works extremely well, I drag the OF task to the DT sorter and into the DT note. Seamless. :slight_smile:

What makes Craft more attractive for you say, than Drafts? Out of what I have read about Craft, I can more or less replicate it in Drafts.
Perhaps that Drafts is customizable app, I struggle to try new note/writing apps. Obviously I don’t write long forms as you, and if I need extra focus, I may open iA Writer. It easy for me to start to modify actions in Drafts when I actually should write etc.

Drafts is a fine app, and I can and have (and may once again!) use it to take notes on an iOS device and then send to DT. It works great for that purpose. What I don’t like about Drafts is the “file” organizational structure.I find it unintuitive to use the filter/tagging/workspaces approach to organizing material. That said, all I really need is to take notes and then send them to DT, which works great. :slight_smile:

Thanks @ryanjamurphy! I testing this out tonight with DT3 and was pleased to see that it works just as advertised - creating a text note in DT3 in an indexed folder indeed created the file in said folder, and creating a group created a subfolder. Awesome.

Next question: I make the assumption that it would be a bad idea to have DT running on my two machines syncing to each other via a sync store AND have the same indexed folders syncing via a Dropbox style mechanism (eg SynologyDrive which is what I use). I assume that having a folder syncing by two different mechanisms at the same time is a prescription for trouble.

Since DTTG needs to sync to a DevonThing sync store, presumably therefore it is good practice to either create indexed folders outside of a sync’d Finder folder and let DT do the syncing, OR have the folders sync via Dropbox (or SynologyDrive) and disable syncing of indexed folders for that sync store, which would necessarily make it such that DTTG cannot access the indexed files.

Do I have that right?

Finally: I recall seeing someone a description of a rule to be used in DT that caused reindexing every time a group was selected in the sidebar, which I imagine I will need - unless DT3 automatically reindexes when you click on a group. I don’t recall where I saw it; I wonder if anyone else has seen this and remembers where it was.

Progress being made…I think DT is coming back into my toolkit!

Best to ask on the DT Discourse, but I suspect you are right: multiple sync services operating on the same files seems like a recipe for conflicts.

As for the folder script, I don’t think it’s necessary anymore. It was necessary for DTPO, but DT3 brought greatly improved indexing abilities.

Yes, I just verified that both your number 1 and 2 works as you describe.

I don’t synch my indexed DT database to DTTG so I can’t test that one.

1 Like