Making Lists Processable in Drafts

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Drafts application is where I spend a large part of my time on my laptop. In the application there are Actions that you set up to process the text you add to a draft. There are tons of them so you can customize your actions to be your perfect text command center.

One action I use so much, and take for granted, is the "New draft from each selected line" action. It takes a list and separates the list item into their own draft.

For example, in the morning I open up Drafts or a text editor and pour my mind into it to get all the things I need to do or are buzzing in my head out of my head. I do it in a giant blob of text because formatting interrupts the process of getting things out of the brain. The problem with that is I have a giant blob of tasks and ideas that should be a list.

Then I process the blob of text with Apple writing tools using the List feature. I processes the blob and makes a list. Using the "new draft from each selected line" action I make each list item a separate Draft.

After that I can go through the list and process each item one by one. Usually what I have to do is:

  1. Store thoughts into their spot (reference file or list)
  2. Make an event on the calendar
  3. Make a task in reminders

For the third one, there is usually three or more things to get into Reminders. Drafts has a way to process them all at once. If you select multiple drafts, you can run an action on all of them. I have a "Add to Reminders" action I run that processes them all.

This looks like a long process but beyond typing out the things in my mind, this takes seconds to do.

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