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, DevonThink, is an excellent option for storing these types of information.

Since exploring linked thought and tools like Roam 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.

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 5% of the features of what DevonThink can do.

But if I click through here, you can see that there are these different related 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 DevonThink 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 DevonThink, though you can, I would be taking notes inside of Obsidian and having them searchable and indexable inside of DevonThink so I can leverage the benefits of the tool there.

One cool thing that you can do with DEVONthink 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 DEVONthink clipper extension up here, save to DEVONthink. 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, I 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 OCRs 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 DEVONthink, 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 DEVONthink 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 video. Thanks for watching.

Use Obsidian and DEVONthink Together! - Effective Remote Work

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