How to Schedule Tasks in DEVONthink

You can automate work in DEVONthink both interactively and unattended. Smart rules and reminders both support time-based actions. Smart rules’ time-based triggers run at intervals: every minute, hourly, daily, weekly. This is great for tasks that can run within a general timeframe, e.g., “This needs to be done sometime tomorrow”. But reminders have the advantage when precise scheduling is needed.

Reminders let you set exact times, days, and well-defined recurrences. You’ll have these options:

• Once: only trigger an alarm once.
• Hourly: run at a chosen time and interval.
• Daily: run at a chosen time, with a configurable day interval.
• Weekly: pick days of the week and interval (e.g., every two weeks).
• Monthly: choose a calendar day or an occurrence (e.g., second Thursday).
• Yearly: select months and occurrences.

While reminders have fewer built-in actions than smart rules, they still support a range of practical alarms: play a sound, send an email, open a document, or run a script. If you plan to automate via scripting, see Automation > Reminder Scripts in the Help for examples and details.

Imagine you have a timesheet you’d need to open every Friday before you leave work. Maybe you want to open the stock page in your browser every morning at 9:30 am. Or how about optimizing and creating a database archive on the last Sunday of each month? You can precisely schedule all these things with reminders. Add a reminder to a document in its Info > Annotations & Reminders inspector.

For broader, event-driven automation and reminders when you need more precise timing use smart rules. Pick the one that fits how precisely your task needs to be scheduled.

Note: Enable Settings > General > Enable reminder alarms to ensure your alarms will function properly.

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