Use Obsidian and DEVONthink Together! - Effective Remote Work

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 devon think 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 devon think 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 devon think comes into play in devon think 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 bio previously for this so you could use something if you're just looking at web articles like that or insta paper pocket maybe even pin board but where i think devon think 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 a 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 devon think 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 devon think 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 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 devon think 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 devon think 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 video thanks for watching