Drafts

[marcia]

Drafts has become an InBox for my iPad and iPhone. It lives in my Dock. When I open Drafts it has a blank note and the keyboard is active. I can very quickly type in some text then from within Drafts I can send it to Reminders or if I type in multiple lines I can send them all as an entire list to Reminders. There is a long list of apps it works with, including OmniFocus.

 

[DenaDahilig]

Thanks, Marcia... your timing is excellent!

I have a notepad next to my bed but I can't turn the light on to make notes without waking up my hubby, so my written notes are often illegible in the morning.

So I've found myself reaching for my phone instead, but opening a new note in Evernote takes too much brain power when I'm trying to hold onto a fleeting thought and find my glasses at the same time. Drafts sounds like a great solution. I'll let you know how it goes!

Dena

 

[marcia]

Dena, I like Drafts' dark theme at night, easier on my eyes!

 

[mcogilvie]

I like Drafts too. I have it set up to repopulate in Reminders a shopping list for my parents and also a packing list. I think this is a great feature. My only wish is that it could process a selection as well as an entire item, so I could process thing like meeting notes very efficiently. Oh, and if the developer did that, I would love an OS X version too.

 

[marcia]

Processing a selection would be great. For next best thing, I tap the selection and then select > New. That puts the selected text in its own note.

Great idea to save a list and repopulate to Reminders.

I like Drafts too. I have it set up to repopulate in Reminders a shopping list for my parents and also a packing list. I think this is a great feature. My only wish is that it could process a selection as well as an entire item, so I could process thing like meeting notes very efficiently. Oh, and if the developer did that, I would love an OS X version too.

 

[marcia]

I noticed there is a tag for using the contents of the clipboard in a custom action. So a custom action could be set up where you select text in your note, copy it, then tap the action to process what you copied.

 

[mcogilvie]

I noticed there is a tag for using the contents of the clipboard in a custom action. So a custom action could be set up where you select text in your note, copy it, then tap the action to process what you copied.

Oh, that is so cool. That will simplify note taking and processing for me a lot. Thanks!

 

[greeno]

I'm playing a lot with drafts, especially using markdown to punt stuff into evernote and day one etc. One of my favourite features is the ability to do pre-defined email actions. I've got one to send the text in drafts to my wife, one to myself etc.

Drafts has a lot of URL actions which it can use, including adding data into omnifocus etc. While I love that feature, it flips over to the app to confirm and complete the add. That disrupted my workflow a little, so I worked on a hack.

You can use the omnifocus mail drop (http://www.omnigroup.com/support/sync/) to mail directly into your omnifocus database. By setting up an email action which sends the drafts text to that email address, you can process items within the app without any interruption.

You can also write actions for things like evernote to prepend/append data to specific notes, great for someday/maybe lists.

Really great app, active development and a great community behind it.

 

[PeterW]

Drafts is insanely good. I use the email option to send tasks to my task manager Appigo Todo which has intelligent task parsing so I can easily create a single task or a checklist of items, assign a context, start/due dates, etc. Drafts is such a clever app!

 

[Mark Jantzen]

Agree, Love Drafts

It's one of the few tools that stays out of my way while I use it.

One of my favorite features is highlighting a bit of text and have the option of "New" to create a new Draft page. It really helps when I'm both capturing and processing stuff into my system.

I push things to:

OmniFocus
Evernote
Day One
Events (Apple Calendar)
Clipboard (e.g. add to an existing thing such as an Evernote page)

Highly recommended.

 

[marcia]

Supposedly OmniFocus can be set to automatically import from Reminders (for the purpose of using Siri).
http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=22688

This gives you another couple of options.

Drafts has two built-in actions for Reminders: send a single reminder or send a list of reminders to a new or existing list. In both cases this happens while staying in Drafts without launching Reminders. Then if these Reminders do get imported into OmniFocus (and it sounds like this is possible) it could be a quick way to send an item, or a batch of items.

Sending a list in Drafts is simple, each line becomes a reminder in Reminders, sent to the default list. (Set your default list in the Reminders settings in the iPhone's Settings.) if the first line begins with @, !, or #, the first line is used as the list name. If the list does not exist it is created in Reminders.

 

[Mark Jantzen]

OmniFocus & Reminders

That feature definitely works as long as your iOS device is capable of Siri. My iPad is but not my iPhone 4.

In my own system I tried both and found each very fast. In the end I gravitated to using the direct to OmniFocus action from Drafts since it is so simple to create new Drafts one after another.

The tool definitely reflects how I think of my GTD implementation.

 

[ext555]

Drafts-Reminders -Onmifocus works great

use it all the time , set up omni focus to import from reminders and everything sent to reminders ends up in omni-focus.

 

[marcia]

Set up actions to go to specific lists in Reminders

Following this article http://sidoneill.com/blog/2013-4-drafts-to-omnifocus-multiple-actions-url-scheme I created an action in Drafts called "Send to Calls in Reminders" with the action set to:

drafts://x-callback-url/create?text=#Calls%0A[[draft]]&action=List%20in%20Reminders

This takes the text in the Drafts note, prepends it with #Calls on a line by itself, then it gets sent to Drafts' built-in "List in Reminders" actions.

The note in Drafts can be a single line or multiple lines. Each line becomes a reminder in my list named "Calls".

I'm setting up an action for each of my four context lists, plus Waiting For list.

If your list name has a space in it, substitute the space with %20. For example:

drafts://x-callback-url/create?text=#Waiting%20For%0A[[draft]]&action=List%20in%20Reminders