Is Drafts a Rest Stop or Luxury Hotel?

Question as I begin to dabble with this app more: are most of you using Drafts as a temporary stop or starting point for text before it goes somewhere else (the original use) or as a home for all your texts of some kind or all kinds? If the former, where are you sending the text to? Is it mostly for email or into other notes apps, etc.? If it’s the latter, do you use other notes apps too?

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I think that’s an ongoing question and the answer is often different for different people.

Right now, I’m kind of using it as a bit of both. For example, I’ll take the vast majority of my notes in Drafts on mac or iOS and then…well it depends (and that’s a problem).

Some notes stick around in Drafts because they are short little things that don’t really need to go anywhere else. Some are tasks that hopefully get moved into OmniFocus 3. Some longer notes currently get sent to the now-in-beta DEVONthink 3 Pro via a Dropbox textfile. I have considered pushing them to Ulysses, but I just can’t get myself to really buy into that system.

The “problem” with Drafts is that’s not really meant as a notes repository in the same way that nvALT, Bear, or Agenda are. And while content remains in Drafts, it’s invisible to other apps like DT3.

Bottom line, I’m struggling with this and very curious how this thread develops!

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More and more, I’m coming to depend on Drafts as my primary text-base, and thus far I’m quite happy. I’m primarily an iPad user (writer, educator, programme director, lightweight coder) who occasionally breaks out a MacBook Air for heavier lifting.

When macOS was my daily go-to I went through all of the better known favourites for managing notes, finally settling on HogBay’s FoldingText + Dropbox, which worked pretty well in conjunction with Editorial on the iPad. As I’ve come to lean on iOS more and more for getting real work done, and particularly with recent updates, I’ve gone all in on Drafts.

I store creative writing (a large part of my “real” work), essays, social media posts (really useful as some tweet-storms are first draft essays), excerpts from web pages, journal entries, work logs, and all the other miscellany that ends up in a note-taking inbox. I also use it as an information store alongside iThoughts.

Even on iOS, I’ve tried a range of other options for different aspects of the work I do (DevonThink, iA Writer, Scrivener etc). I’m still bouncing between Evernote, DevonThink and Readdle Documents to manage PDFs, web archives and other documents that aren’t text files. But Drafts is the app I feel most comfortable authoring the vast majority of my text based work in— it’s amazingly extensible, has a fantastic community, and I’m really keen to reduce the amount of scatter in my set-up. I’ve reached a point in my experience of Drafts where, beyond specific functions (e.g. posting a draft to social media or a web page, or exporting a finished piece of writing for submission) there’s often little benefit in pushing my drafts elsewhere.

Looking forward to hearing more about alternative or similar perspectives…

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Super helpful. Thanks for sharing.

My use of Drafts changed very much since I dig a little bit deeper into JS and Drafts 5 came out.
I used Drafts 4 just as a starting point and then sent my notes to Todoist (if it was a task) or to evernote (if it was project related , some meeting notes or any other note).
With Drafts 5 I started to learn JS and build my own script-based actions to simplify my workflows. Since the beginning of the year I started struggling with evernote more and more - because its too buggy to use and too slow at the moment. I’m still in the progress of changing the setup and merging all important note into the new system I use but this is how / what I use at the moment (or how I want to use the tools):
Any text starts In Drafts.
If its a simple task (or something I want to have in a shared list) I use action to publish them to the desired todoist project and the Draft itself will be deleted.
If its e.g. a meeting note and I need to rework them or a bigger task with many notes - I create a Task in todoist which uses Drafts permalinks to link back to the draft (and of course I dont delete the task).
Any text based notes I take stay in drafts and I use more or less the same tagging system like I used in evernote (its based on this video from Enrico Nahler).
Evernote was my main place to store everything - and I used automation with filterize to automate often done things like renaming of notes and so on. Since Drafts can not store files (like bills…) I switched to iCloud Drive and use Hazel (and iOS Shortcuts) to automate sorting, tagging and renaming files when possible and therefore everything I need to keep is stored in a simple folderstructure in iCloud Drive.
To finish the setup, I use Apple Notes for storing not important documents or customer cards to quickly have access to them on my iPhone (and dont mess up my iCloud Drive).
If I need to share Meeting Notes from Drafts I export the Markdown note to PDF and send them vie E-Mail, Dropbox, Nextcloud or whatever tools they use.

I hope this helps :slight_smile:

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