DEVONthink is great MacOS app for warehousing massive amounts of information and yet giving you easy access when you need it. This “bestness” comes at a price however – a user interface that is a little hard to figure out at first.
Groups are most obvious way to organize documents in DEVONthink. Groups appear in the leftmost pane of the application and look like an outline or file structure. A document can only be in one group at a time…though as with everything DEVONthink there are exceptions to this rule. But let’s keep this simple.
Step 1 – Put Your First Document in a Group
Let’s say you have a stack of documents in your DEVONthink Inbox. Pick one of these and decide what it’s about. At the beginning you don’t want to be too specific, but also not too general. You want to make it easy for DEVONthink’s AI to understand the subject matter of your documents so that it can assist you in future classification.
Suppose you want to group an article about raising guinea pigs as pets. “Articles” is too general and it will be difficult for the AI to distinguish between an article, a blog post or a note. “Guinea pigs” might be too specific, unless domestic rodents is your area of research. “Pets” is probably the best choice for a group name at this point.
You can create a group by selecting your document in the main window, right-clicking and selecting “Group Items”. DEVONthink will put the document in a group and provide an entry field for creating the name. Drag the group icon from the main window to your open database in the left pane.
If you’ve got several documents that belong in the same group you can select all of them and group them at the same time.
Tip – Start Group Names with a Capital Letter, Keep Tags Lowercase
It turns out that in DEVONthink groups are actually a type of tag, meaning that they can show up in a list of all tags. It can be helpful to start groups with a capital letter and keep tags all lowercase so that you can distinguish between the two. You can also prevent groups from displaying with tags, but that’s getting us out into the weeds.
Step 2 – Build Groups Using “See Also & Classify”
Once you have a document in a group you can use DEVONthink’s poweful AI to see if there are other documents that might be a good fit for that group.
See Also & Classify is where you interact with DEVONthink’s AI. This shows up in the far right Inspectors pane of the three-pane display. This used to be activated using DEVONthink’s famous “Magic Hat” icon but now looks more like a disolving hamburger button. It’s just to the left of the maginfying glass.
The top of the pane shows the “classify” part – a list of groups that the AI thinks might be a good match for your document. This list will improve over time as you add more files and group them.
The bottom pane shows the “see also” part. Here is a list of other documents that the AI determined are semantically related to your selection. The selected document shows at the top of the list and related documents show in descending order ranked by relevance.
In the screencap below you can see that I’ve got an article called “Birding gets new life…” and it is in a group that I’ve named “Nature.” The AI has found two more articles that could be related to my selection, “How to identify Birds by Sounds” and “Bird ID Skills.” I move these into the Nature group…and briefly consider renaming the group “Birding” until I come across a blog called “Camera Trap Codger” about photographing wildlife with remote cameras.
Step 3 – Find Groups for Documents Using “See Also & Classify”
Once you have have your groups populated with two or more documents the AI becomes much better at making selections. I tend to dump a lot of diverse things in my Inbox and then spend times when I’m at low energy going through this inbox and classifying.
While it’s possible to select everything in your Inbox, choose “Classify” from the Data menu and cross your fingers, I think it’s better to make selections from the See Also & Classify pane on a case-by-case basis. Along the way I often find groups that I need to rename or reorganize. I also find many unexpected associations and come up with fresh new ideas.
What’s New in DEVONthink 3.0
Before DEVONthink 3.0 this AI-assisted classification was only available within a particular database. But now you can classify items across databases.
I am using three primary databases for my personal freelance writing – one for notes (zettelkasten), one for all reference materials, and one that’s a kind of workspace where I bring together notes, reference materials and ideas.
So far DEVONthink 3.0 is making it easier to transfer documents back and forth between databases and making sure that things get put back where they belong. But I don’t have many miles on this version yet, so we’ll see how things change.
