Storing Reference Materials: Obsidian vs. DevonThink

Obsidian is great for personal thoughts, while DevonThink excels in storing reference materials like articles and books for long-term access.

### DevonThink: The Ideal Tool for Storing Reference Materials
* 📚 Obsidian, a powerful note-taking tool, may not be the best place to store reference materials like articles and books, as it's more suited for **personal thoughts and ideas**.
* 🔗 DevonThink is recommended as an **excellent option for storing external information**, providing a dedicated space for **other people's thoughts and research materials**.
* 🌐 DevonThink allows for **easy clipping of web articles** directly to your local computer, preserving them in a web archive format that can be **fully styled or viewed minimally**.
* 🧠 The software's built-in AI can **suggest connections between different pieces of information**, enhancing the research and knowledge management process.
* 📄 DevonThink's ability to handle various file types and its standard format approach make it a **versatile and reliable tool** for **long-term information storage**.
* 🔍 While notes are primarily taken in Obsidian, it's possible to **index them in DevonThink** to leverage the AI capabilities for **making connections between different pieces of information**.
* 🚀 DevonThink is recommended for anyone looking to keep information long term, with the flexibility to **archive articles, Kindle books, and scanned documents** for easy access and searchability.
* 💬 "The whole idea here is to have **one place for other people's thoughts**, and that would be DevonThink, and **another place for my own thoughts**, which would be Obsidian."

is Obsidian the best place to store reference materials like PDFs books or articles let's talk about that in today's video hey folks my name is Justin with effective remote work and today we're talking about why I think another software Devon think is an excellent option for storing these types of information since exploring linked thought and tools like ROM research and Obsidian I've tried to figure out this issue what do I do with articles books and things that I might want to come back to at a later point in time do they go in Obsidian or do they reside somewhere else with Obsidian being a tool that's based upon plain text files and standard file formats like PDFs and mp3s I question if Obsidian is the right place for this information to land and here's why Obsidian is an excellent note-taking tool that means it's an excellent place for your own thoughts do you want to clutter that up with fonts of other people that is a question that's at hand today

fellow YouTuber Curtis McHale has a video that I'll link up here somewhere that I think explains it really well. Essentially, you want to have a place for your own thoughts, and I think Obsidian is an excellent place for that. It's a great place to not only write your own thoughts out, but also connect your thoughts and ideas together, things that you're learning. But then he also talks about how you need to have a place for other people's thoughts, and this is where I think DevonThink comes in. Okay, so you can see on the left-hand side of the screen, I have Obsidian up, and then on the right over here, I have DevonThink. Obsidian, again, is an excellent place for your creative thoughts, your ideas, your notes, things that you're learning, things that you're working through. But even with all the clipping tools that are out there now that allow you to clip a website to plain text, I find it a little bit cumbersome to deal with inside of

obsidian itself. That's where DevonThink comes into play. In DevonThink, you can clip a web article directly to your local computer. It comes into a web archive file format, which is basically a bundled web page. You can even flip into the code if you want to. You can have it fully styled like it is on the website, or you can do this minimalistic view that I have here, which is perfect for the exact thing that I am doing now. I was using a service like Raindrop.io previously for this, so you could use something if you're just looking at web articles like that, or Instapaper, Pocket, maybe even Pinboard. But where I think DevonThink excels is the fact that it can handle anything you have to throw at it. And additionally, it has some built-in AI, which I'll be honest with you, I haven't even quite explored too deeply into how this could benefit my workflow, but it has some built-in AI that can kind of tell you some connections.

between different articles or different pieces of information that you might have. So, you can see here that I have this article 9 Trends That Will Shape Work in 2021 and Beyond. This is an article that I clipped here to say, Hey, there's some interesting stuff I want to come back to this in the future. I want to write a literature note on this so that I can transfer some of the information into my own words and start building it into my note-taking system inside of Obsidian. I think having this locally offers a lot of benefits versus something like Raindrop.io because I have access to this file. This is just a file on my file system. Now, granted, DevonThink does put these into a database, but you can easily get these files out of the database and onto your normal file system. You're not stuck in the cloud somewhere. You're not stuck in a proprietary format like you would be with Evernote, which is an alternative option to this, but I prefer DevonThink in this regard.

because it is more of a standard format tool. That's it's a layer that works on top of standard formats versus something proprietary. So on this art article, you can see there's a bunch of tabs over here. And again, I haven't even dug into probably even five percent of the features of what devon think can do. But if I click through here, you can see that there are these different related to items. I guess you can see that this is a perfect match to this one. Uh, that there's a relevance to this salesforce one that I have here declares the nine-to-five workday dead. It just uses ai to kind of see if there's anything interesting or connecting about those pieces of information. Now one interesting thing you can do with devonthink is you can index your notes from obsidian inside of devon thinks so that it can use this ai on the connections there as well between different pieces of information. So while I wouldn't necessarily take notes inside of devon think, though you can, I would be taking notes

inside of obsidian and having them searchable and indexable inside of devon thinks so i can leverage the benefits of the tool there. One cool thing that you can do with dev and think is clip articles as you've seen here directly into that. I'll show you how that works. Swap over to this article here why remote work is so hard and how it can be fixed. This is an article that I've already taken some notes on inside of obsidian but I haven't clipped it to devonthink yet so I figured I would do that really quick today. I have the devin think clipper extension up here. Save to devon think. I'm going to click on that. It's going to say hey you want to open this up okay I'll open it then. I get this little quick capture window here. It gives me tons of options. I can add comments so if I have a quick thought that I want to remember about that article to potentially turn into a note at a later point in time I can add it in there. I get the url.

can add information ratings tagging and things. I can change the format if I want to put this into a PDF versus a web archive. I can do the clutter-free mode, which is, again, just the text. And then I can choose the location. Here, it's into my reference database and into the inbox. I'm just going to click Add. And then we'll go back to DevonThink and why remote work is so hard and how it can be fixed. You can see that it clipped it very nicely there. Now, again, I'm only scratching the very surface of what DevonThink can do. It's an incredibly powerful piece of software. But I will say that I think DevonThink is an excellent option if you're looking to keep information long term. If I want to have access to these articles to come back to them at some point in the future, say if I decide to write a book or say if I'm working on some sort of a paper for a pro masters program or something if I decide to go back to school.

i have access to all of these things. It's not dependent on a web service. It's not dependent on anything out in the cloud. It's just me here on my computer. i can sync it through whatever sync service that i want to, and i have access to all these items. If i want to pull my kindle books in here as an archive copy, i can do that as well. i can scan pieces of paper into this, and it ocr's them so i can search the text from the pdf format. And that's it. Again, the whole idea here is to have one place for other people's thoughts, and that would be devin think, and another place for my own thoughts, which would be obsidian. That wraps things up for today's video. i hope you found it helpful. Let me know what you think about devon think in the comments below. Is this something that you would consider looking at, or are you using a different tool? i would love to hear what you're using as well. Again, my name is justin with effective remote work. Talk to you in the next

Use Obsidian and DEVONthink Together! - Effective Remote Work

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The Best Software for Storing Reference Materials

Obsidian is great for personal thoughts and note-taking, but may not be the best place for storing articles and books, especially with its focus on plain text files.

DevonThink, on the other hand, is an excellent option for storing reference materials, allowing users to organize and manage a large number of PDFs, books, and articles.

The combination of Obsidian for personal thoughts and DevonThink for external reference materials provides a comprehensive system for knowledge management.

The Power of DevonThink for Web Clipping and Organization

DevonThink allows you to clip web articles to your local computer in a web archive format, offering a fully styled or minimalistic view.

io or Instapaper, DevonThink excels in handling various types of information and offers built-in AI for making connections between different pieces of information.

This local approach provides more benefits than cloud-based services and proprietary formats, making it a preferred choice for web clipping and organization.

Using DevonThink for Information Management

DevonThink is a tool that works with standard formats and has a wide range of features for managing information.

It can be used to index notes from Obsidian and utilize AI for making connections between different pieces of information.

Additionally, DevonThink allows users to clip articles directly into the tool, providing a quick capture window with various options.

The Power of DevonThink for Long-Term Information Management

DevonThink is a powerful software for long-term information storage, offering the ability to sync through various services and providing access to a wide range of content, including PDFs and scanned documents.

It allows users to keep all their information independent of web services or the cloud, making it a valuable tool for those looking to store and organize a large volume of data.

With its OCR capability, DevonThink enables users to search the text from scanned PDFs, offering a comprehensive solution for managing both personal and external knowledge.

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