Is it possible to have an action executed automatically upon draft creation? For example, if I dictated a draft with Siri on my watch, could I have a specific action take place on the draft immediately without getting out my phone and choosing it manually?
Mike Burns
No, there’s no automatic triggering. You have to select an action and run it. You can select multiple drafts in the draft list and run an action, if you just want to bulk process stuff out now and then.
I suspected as much when I couldn’t find a way. Thanks for the confirmation - batch processing will indeed do some of what I was attempting.
Mike
I know it’s a long shot, but would it be possible to trigger an action through Siri? If so, @MikeBurns could dictate his draft, then voice-trigger the action, all without touching his phone.
I see this thread is a few years old, so I wanted to see if this has changed since it was answered back in 2018.
Is there a way to automate an action to be triggered immediately upon completing a new draft?
I’m an attorney and I want to use my Apple Watch to capture time entries as I do work. So I would be creating anywhere between 20 to 40 very short drafts every day. It would be great if drafts could automatically run an action that would append a new time entry to an existing Excel spreadsheet or even an MS Word or TXT document that I could create in OneDrive. Or perhaps append to a table that I create in OneNote.
Slight variation on the question is whether you can automate an action to occur at a specific time every day? Like have my time entry drafts all appended to my spreadsheet at 8:00 pm every day?
Thanks and sorry if these are dumb questions. I’m brand new to Drafts.
There is no way to trigger an action upon draft “completion”.
In terms of scheduling an action to run, you could do this using Shortcuts on your iPhone and an action crafted explicitly to process your inbox. However, I think your phone might need to be unlocked for it to run. That used to be the case and I haven’t tried it in a while, so it is possible that has changed. But, maybe a reminder to manually run it would suffice?
If you have a Mac, then I think running a scheduled shortcut on there might be more practical, but since Shortcuts does not have a scheduling option on the Mac, you would need to do the scheduling external to Shortcuts.
You can also create an action that creates the draft and does further action afterwards (e.g. you can type the content for the new draft into a prompt or something else.
I did that for my On My Mind Action Group 
Can you do that from the Apple Watch? I thought the only option at that point would be to capture the times.
No you’re right that’s not possible.
I think the closest you can get is what you already described with an always on Mac
Depends on the usecase
Again, not fully automated, but if you did want to ensure it gets run, Due app may come in handy as it supports opening URL schemes. So you could have a Workspace that has all entries from your Apple Watch, tagged Watch, and restricted to today. So this workspace could be opened by Due App and then just run your action against it when you’ve selected/merged your required entries.
As for the csv/text file bit, this is easily achieved in Google Sheets. You could write the draft entries to a file on your Google Drive and then schedule an apps script to import. The IMPORTDATA function in Google Sheets only works with data published to the web, so you’d need to go the apps script/drive route if keeping the data private. Likely the same achievable in Excel but I’ve not checked that out.
It’s been 3 years since there has been any activity on this question.
Is this possible yet?
Any plans on implementing it if not?
It’s highly useful
I believe the solutions remain the same as before.
Mostly the same. You can trigger Drafts actions via Shortcuts that run in the background now, so a bit more friendly to having a scheduled task monitor a tag and process those items.