Member-only story
How to build a Personal Document Management System (PDMS) and why you need it
My personal experience
Evernote
I’ve spent many years building a lifelong personal library. A couple of years back, the first time I tried to manage my Ebooks is using Evernote. I saved every single document into Evernote, from diaries to notes, from lecture notes to reference books.
However, when my notes number larger than 1000, it is very difficult for me to locate the documents.
Finally, I found Evernote really sucks on document management. It may be good for information storage but definitely not for document management. Even the advanced search feature still sucks, and the note size also has limitations.
File Explorer
Then I came back to the old but effective way, using the File Explorer and making all the documents nested inside the well-structured folder structure.
But wait, the problem is still there, once my documents getting more and more, how can I search them in a second? And most importantly, how can I manage them, classify them, and even reuse/reference them when I needed. Besides, How can I save the web pages for reading them later, how can I save the online videos and never lost them?
Let’s talk about Document Management
DMS (Document Management System)
Document management is very common in Business, there are also many Document management system (DMS) out there, the purpose of such systems are to receive, track, versions, manage and store documents and reduce paper.
PDMS (Personal Document Management System)
Personal documents have not much attention before, there may be some solutions, such as Evernote, Devonthink, etc. But they have many drawbacks:
- You have to pay for using them
- You may need to save your content to the software providers, no one can promise you they will help you to save them permanently.
- Lots of limitations and rely on managing the software itself rather than managing our content.
