Taking Smart Notes with DEVONthink

by Kourosh Dini

"Taking Smart Notes with DEVONthink" is a comprehensive guide to utilizing the powerful note-taking and organization tool, DEVONthink. This book provides step-by-step instructions on how to efficiently create, store, and retrieve notes using DEVONthink, while also discussing best practices for effective note-taking. The author explores various features and functions of DEVONthink, including its AI capabilities, search functionality, and syncing options. With this guide, readers can streamline their note-taking process and improve their productivity, making it an essential resource for students, researchers, and professionals alike.

Genres: Productivity

500 pages, ebook

First published May 1, 2020

About the author

Writings

Kourosh Dini is the author of Creating Flow with OmniFocus: Mastering Productivity. As he is known to do many things, Kourosh has needed a tool and method by which he could wrangle it all. The book describes this process of wrangling in hopes that others will find such wranglings useful, too.

He has written Workflow Mastery: Building from the Basics which combines his thoughts on psychoanalysis, creativity, efficiency, and most importantly what it takes to develop mastery and meaningful work. The first edition, Workflow: Beyond Productivity, has won an eLit bronze medal in educational ebooks and a Quality, Excellence, Design Award.

He is also the author of Video Game Play and Addiction: A Guide for Parents, which helps parents navigate the benefits and potential detriments of video games and virtual spaces. The book has won a Mom’s Choice Award and a National Parenting Publication Award.

Education
Academics include Northwestern University as a part of the Integrated Science Program with a focus in the neurosciences. His medical degree and residency in adult psychiatry were obtained through the University of Illinois at Chicago. He pursued further studies in child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Chicago. Kourosh also practices psychoanalysis having graduated from the Institute for Psychoanalysis, and maintains a private practice in Chicago involving therapy, meditation, and medication management.

Music
He has also played the piano since an early age, plays a synthesizer, pretends to play guitar, and whistles, usually in a garage or some other place with good resonance. He performs music weekly and has periodically spoken about meditation as Kourosh Eusebio in the virtual world of Second Life.

His blog, Musings on Mind, Music, and Technology, reflects his thoughts of this unique intersection as he continues a path of discovering mind and artistry through these media.

Reviews

[Paul Christy · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you are a fan of DEVONthink, as I am, and you also want to bend it from an archival/document storage tool to a living "thought" record, then Kourosh Dini's book is perfect. He successful guides you to change your thinking about DEVONthink from a noun to a verb: that is, from a static way to store files, emails, PDFs, etc. To an active thought-tracker. This book is in the mode of Sônke Ahrens popular "How to Take Smart Notes," and re-worked for the DEVONthink enthusiast.

Beware, you will want to know about DEVONthink, Apple Macs, AppleScript, and Keyboard Maestro to really adopt the techniques covered.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

As with all of Dini's books, he writes about not only how to do things, but why to do things as well.
Highly recommended, as is all his other books and video courses, and his free Saturday concerts on YouTube as well!

[Jochen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finally realized that strategic note-taking is far superior to thinking "I really need to remember this." I've already been a DEVONthink user for many years but I used it only for archiving documents. This book has helped me build the foundation of an actively used and maintained knowledge base.

[Fábio Fortkamp · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was expecting something completely different from this book, especially based on my experience on the author's other great work, "Creating flow with Omnifocus". That book is generally about productivity, and you can almost follow it by implementing the methods in other softwares; but this books is much more focused on the software itself than on general ideas. So there are a lot of screenshots and scripts - which can be found in the official documentation. In summary: I was expecting more personalized notes and how he uses DEVONthink on his own projects.

Still is a good reference to DEVONthink, and definitely helps you get started with a more systematic process of taking notes.

[Felipe (fcy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really like how Kourosh explains a system while also showing how to do it in practice, I've been into Obsidian and PKM for the past year but I think this book made me want to develop a slip-box with DEVONthink. And more importantly the slip-box does't have to be the single place to put all notes, it is the place to think about what I want to think about.

Next on my list is reading Kourosh OmniFocus book, not because I don't know how to use it but because I really enjoyed his system with DEVONthink and I want to see how he uses OmniFocus too.