When I first started this blog years ago, I wrote mainly about paper planners. I was a bit obsessive about my Filofax(es) and switched up my “system” just about every week. For anyone in that community, planner fail isn’t uncommon. In fact, Filofaxes almost encourage the behavior, but when I went digital, I thought my days of planner fail were behind me.
Then, a few weeks ago, I wrote about how thrilled I was to abandon Evernote and consolidate all my notes into Apple Notes. Well, it took me about 2 weeks to realize that probably wasn’t the smartest move after all. As much as I thought I’d like having my notes all in one place, in practice, it actually frustrated me.
Now I will say, none of this was a fault of Apple Notes. Apple Notes is surprisingly powerful and handled everything I threw at it. My frustration was due more to how my brain works than software limitations.
Apple Notes originally won me over with its simplicity, but once you add a few hundred notes, it turns out Apple Notes or any system for that matter stops being so simple. Having everything in Apple Notes forced me to accept that I actually prefer having some sort of distinction between my active notes and reference notes.
And this is where planner-fail returns… but as notes fail.
I didn’t go running back to Evernote. I’ve actually enjoyed my time without the green elephant and even turned off my subscription. I also didn’t abandon Apple Notes – at least not entirely. Apple Notes continues to be the home for “active” notes that I access regularly – my heavily-used collection of carryout menus, jotting down quick notes, and things like the list of things to do that I share with my boyfriend.
The rest of my notes, the reference and project-based notes, all now live in…
drumroll
As a self-proclaimed Mac Power User, the move to DEVONthink has been a long time coming. I’d just been avoiding the learning curve and let’s be honest the price (although the education discount helped!).
While I still don’t care for the dated interface (which I hear may be getting a facelift in the future), there are a number of things I do enjoy.
- I get to pick where my data is stored – and it doesn’t belong to Evernote. I have 3 separate databases. My personal database is synced via iCloud. My other two databases, Work and School, are synced via my university’s Box cloud storage.
- Getting data into DEVONthink is about as easy as it was with Evernote (and much easier than Apple Notes). DEVONthink’s browser extension does what I need it to for archiving websites, and I can archive emails from Airmail directly to DEVONthink as well (although they’re plain text – Airmail team, if you’re listening, you could do better!). Airmail had no integration with Apple Notes
- I can search my notes with Alfred. Alfred couldn’t search Apple Notes which forced me to use Spotlight.
- I get to use my favorite apps. Plenty of apps integrate with Evernote and Apple Notes as far as saving things into them, but once something is saved, you’re limited to editing a note within the Evernote or Apple Notes apps. With DEVONthink, I can use the Open with Feature and edit saved files within my favorite apps. (I’m writing this post in FoldingText, but it’s actually stored in DEVONthink.)
- Artificial Intelligence – This is a feature I didn’t really think much of when I bought it. It sounded cool, but I figured it’d be a gimmick like Evernote’s, context feature. My main motivation for having a central place to store notes was to hopefully be able to find connections between things I’m storing, and DEVONthink’s AI feature does this automatically! Looking at my book notes for Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, I also get suggestions for notes I’ve taken on his other book, Homo Deus. It even makes suggestions for books I would have never even made connections to like Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael or Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow. This is a game changer (and it may be enough of a game changer to sway me into continuing on for my Ph.D.).
DEVONthink isn’t perfect. I’ve had to make a few changes to adapt to its interface and storage methods, but I’m pretty confident that DEVONthink is here to stay as part of my tool bag of pro apps.
Lastly, if you’re on the fence about DevonThink or were like me and downloaded the trial a handful of times only to delete the app out of overwhelm, I highly recommend reading Take Control of Getting Started with DEVONthink 2.
Photo by Delano Balten on Unsplash
According to Andrea 
I can sympathize. I’ve been through several iterations of “notes fail,” cycling though Apple Notes, OneNote, Workflowy, and Dynalist.
I finally settled on using Apple Notes for quick capture of ideas and plain text files for almost everything else. Plain text does not lock me into a proprietary format, and there’s no learning curve.
The DEVONthink products are amazing. I’ve played with them. What stops me is the learning curve and proprietary format. I’m also not sure how easy it is to export notes — an option you always want to have just in case you change your mind again and want to switch apps.
There’s no right answer, however. I hope that your current app choices work for you for a long time into the future.
I won’t lie – a purely file system based system has always sounded incredibly appealing to me, but for now, I’m happy to have my mix of plain text, image, and PDF files in DEVONthink. They’ve actually done a great job at making it easy to export files back out of DEVONthink in their original formats, so I’m not too worried about getting data out. For those that are really concerned about not storing your data in the app, you can always have it index a folder structure in Finder and still get all the benefits of search. I felt much more locked in with Evernote and Apple Notes than I do now which is a great feeling knowing I have the freedom to choose where my data lives and what I edit it with.
Thanks for stopping by!
“proprietary format,” all your data is yours. Devonthink is just a database, Cocoa, AI, and leveraging the features of the OS X. If you ever want to leave. You can export, click and drag, or copy and paste, etcetera.