Hi, folks. I’ve been a pro-subscriber to Drafts since the beginning but I never feel I’m getting the most from it. I want to ask a pretty basic question about workflows.
I’ve tons of drafts in my Inbox. I’ve discovered how workspaces can make this more manageable by, for example, have a workspace to filter my Inbox down to specific notes for home issues, or goals lists, or movies recommendations. When I activate those workspaces my Inbox is appropriately filtered. That’s great.
But in my mind I feel as though I’m missing something. I feel as though I should be processing my Inbox, not just filtering it. Is it normal to have hundreds of drafts in my Inbox or should they be moved to other “folders?” Trouble is, the only other folders seem to be the static list of Flagged, Archive, All and Trash.
Would appreciate any guidance or workflows those of you Draft experts are using to get the most out of this powerful tool. Thanks.
Is this causing you any issues, or are you just worries that you are missing something transformative?
If the latter, then you are not really. The usual paradigm is that you do process your inbox. Anything you will never reuse goes to the trash. Anything you might reuse goes to archive. But archive is still just a bucket like the inbox. All you are doing is designating a different folder name to hold all of those drafts you are retaining.
My Folders in Drafts post might also be worth a quick scan through. It goes into a little more detail about how the folders are typically used.
But, you are always free to use Drafts however you like, which brings me back to my original point. Is this just something you feel that there might be missing out on, or is there an underlying issue that you are looking to solve, with how your Drafts are currently organised? What are the challenges in organising your drafts that you think could be addressed by some change?
There are many ways to approach organization, of course. Not any “right” way.
I think there are many people who use Drafts just as a capture tool, not for long term storage. In this case, they generally capture to the inbox, and “processing” typically involves running actions that export that draft to another system - todo manager, other notes app, file, etc. - outside of Drafts, at which time the action automatically archives or trashes the draft and gets it out of the inbox. Thus the inbox is a simple queue for processing those captured thoughts.
Others use Drafts for longer-term storage and reference. In case, which sounds like what you are doing with reference lists and such, it is often good to setup your default workspace to show only “untagged” drafts.
Then as you process drafts by assigning them tags (“lists”, whatever) that you have associated with workspace filters, you will only see those drafts in those workspaces.
You can set that up by filtering for “untagged” in the tag filter, then in list options (…) choose “Set as Default” to save that - then when you tap the (x) to clear your filters, you get the default workspace of only untagged items.
The other option is just to use the archive more freely. That is what I do. Most things like running lists, etc., I have in the archive. I have my “Lists” and other similar workspaces configured to automatically select the “Archive” tab when applied.
Generally, I do use Drafts as a capture tool and develop ideas or projects in other tools. But there are a handful of reference items, like recommendations one gets from friends about a great movie or restaurant, that I think would be handy to keep in drafts. The idea of putting those into the archive with dedicated workspaces for quick access is appealing to me, thank you. I like, too, the idea of my default list being those scraps that are yet to be categorized with tags.
This is great. More generally, the quality of the two responses here is really eye-opening. Makes me want to delve into this community even more!
I use Drafts as a capture tool and export them into Obsidian for long term storage and searching.
Except, those long-form web articles which I’ll get into one day, I store them in Drafts and tag them as “read-later”. I create a workspace to filter the tag “read-later”. Within this workspace, I use flag to prioritize those I want to read first and archive those I’ve read.
I’d imagine you’d want to do the same with your movie or recipe recommendations.