Let’s say I have a draft that I want to file away in the Archive for now, but have it automatically return to the Inbox on a specified date (as in the traditional tickler file). Is it possible to do this within Drafts with an Action?
The best I’ve come up with is to make a Things todo, copying the draft’s title into the Things name, copying the item link into the Things notes field, and then setting the date in Things. So when it appears in my Today view, I click on the link to go to the draft and move it manually back into my Inbox. This works but it’s a bit clunky and I’d prefer to have it all self-contained within Drafts.
Spitballing: Drafts doesn’t have any date based automation built-in, so you’re either going to be dealing with another app to act the date as a trigger for reviewing archived drafts, or manually running a Drafts action daily.
Not sure if you’re on i(Pad)OS or macOS. I’m almost exclusively on i(Pad)OS, so others might have different ways of going about this…
First thought: Shortcuts automation. Set up a Drafts action to query your archived drafts for today’s date and return any matching drafts to the inbox; use a Shortcuts automation to trigger that action daily. Aside from any possible gotchas with background permissions (I’d need to check whether this would be the kind of automation that could run in the background without approval, and I imagine that might require a little consideration for best set-up) this could give you something that could almost run itself.
Might seem obvious, but with the above thinking in mind, you could just run such an action manually each morning. You just wouldn’t have the prompt of seeing items pop up in your Things dashboard. You could attach it to another habit you might have— e.g. if you keep a daily journal (“when I journal… also run Drafts tickler action”).
One good thing about the way you’re currently working is that the process of going through Things means you’re manually reviewing what’s come up. Maybe that’s valuable in your workflow, forcing you to pay attention to what’s present? You could refine this way of working further by a) scripting an action that creates a Things task from the current draft (to make this part easier) and b) create a separate action that moves a draft back from the archive to the inbox on the basis of a draft UUID. The first action you create can then pass a Drafts url for the second action along with the draft’s UUID in the content of the Things task it creates, so all you’re doing is tapping the URL in a Things task to resurface the associated draft in Drafts. Might be just enough automation to make your current methodology less clunky, but just enough manual engagement to keep you connected with your items.
Hope that’s useful. Curious to know which way you’ll go, or if anyone has any other thoughts.
It doesn’t sound like the traditional 43-folder storage approach for a tickler file is necessary here, and it is just the bringing content to the inbox on a specified date.
If so, there have been a few discussions on this topic over the years. I think the first one was this one.
Greg made some suggestions around using a defer tag and a sweep action. As an option, this would tie into the automated Shortcuts run described by @jsamlarose above. Something runs periodically to change the attributes on a draft so it shows it he desired location. This requires some additional meta data to be added to the draft as a tag, or even as say some data in the draft (you could use YAML for example if you were using Markdown( but this messes up the headings in the drafts listing because it is typically line 1) or externally held meta data.
Another approach is to use the existing meta data such as the creation date. This is something I covered in the above topic, and involves using an action (included in the post) to set the creation date for a future date and setting a workspace to filter out future dated drafts. This approach is overriding when you created the draft (which could be important information), but it does negate the need to have a periodic update of drafts.
There are pros and cons to both approaches as I think this sort of functionality is at a fringe in terms of capabilities.
Combining Drafts with another app like Things is not necessarily a bad approach. Things will give you a lot more power around time management and organisation than Drafts because they are occupying different domains and while there is some overlap, moving out of a domain is where you hit limitations. Jacob’s suggestion on automating your Things interactions with Drafts actions is very practical and just builds on your existing solution.
Thanks so much Jacob and Stephen for your fast and thoughtful responses, and also for the link to the earlier post which my search hadn’t found (because my search term was too narrow (“tickler”)).
I did have the GTD/43Folders concept for a tickler file vaguely in mind, but also the functionality in most email clients that lets you snooze an email for a specified period before popping it back into the Inbox (Incidentally and completely off-topic, I may be the last person to realise that (in Fastmail at least) you can snooze messages from your Sent folder, but this is incredibly useful for chasing tardy respondents.)
Anyway, from your posts I see two approaches that appeal to me in the absence of a dedicated function for this:
Use Things as I originally envisaged, but with some automation as suggested to capture the title and UUID into Things and simultaneously add a “deferred” tag and archive the note. This has the benefit as noted of letting me see what I have coming up in Things alongside all my other commitments
Simply use a “deferred” tag and corresponding Workspace, and review this periodically. I already have a weekly repeating task for Friday afternoons in Things to review & clear out my various Inboxes (with checklist items for Drafts, email, Things, Devonthink), so it wouldn’t be a big leap to either have a separate task to review the Deferred Workspace, or to add it as another checklist item in my existing weekly task. As a refinement, I think it would be useful to make an action to (a) tag and move the note I want to defer, and (b) add a line just below the title saying Deferred to: [date]. The point of (b) is that when I reviewed my Deferred Workspace I could see quickly whether a note needed my attention yet.
Or use both of these together – reviewing a Deferred Workspace has the advantage of surfacing things that have been deferred well into the future, i.e. further forward than I would normally bother to look in my Things weekly reviews.
Thinking about my requirements a bit more, part of the challenge here is to find the balance between automation and mindfulness about what I’m doing. There’s some benefit in a little friction, in taking the time to review what’s deferred, etc. I think both the approaches above would be somewhere near the right balance.
Thanks again. I’ll try these out and see how I go.
I have two suggestions depending on where you want to see those tickler items.
Things Action
If you want to have those tickler items in things (e.g. to easily change a date or see upcoming items in your task manager), I suggest that you create a drafts action that will do the following:
lets you select a date
creates the task in things (using the url scheme) with
title as your drafts title
note (or also in the title) containing the link to open that draft
due date set to the date you selected earlier
(you could also add a link to the task into the draft - so you have them cross linked between Drafts and Things)
This is a one time action that you run manually for each draft that should pop up at some point in the future.
Drafts only Actions
If you want to keep these things out of your Things app you could also make use of two drafts actions which I just published:
You can run this action with a shortcuts automation when you open drafts (this will prevent issues with background permissions. I do something similar with Readwise highlights and I have a Shortcut that checks for the last opening date of Drafts and only if it was not opened on this day it will run the action in drafts. This would be a perfect use case for such an automation and I can see if I can share that shortcut if you’re interested.
If you want to go the Things route and need help with the action scripting, let me know
Hi, many thanks for your helpful response. I’m still in two minds about which approach I prefer, so want to give them both a try
I’m pretty much a novice at creating Drafts actions (as opposed to downloading ones written by others), but would like to get better at this, so I’ll have a shot at making the action for Things you describe for myself – if I get stuck I’ll come back here, thanks for the offer.
I’ve downloaded your Drafts actions and tried them out, both work as described for me. Using a Shortcuts automation triggered by opening Drafts is a clever idea that wouldn’t have occurred to me. And I’m to discover I can figure out myself how to make the automation! If I understand correctly, the action searches for a match to a text string, so if you don’t happen to open Drafts on the specified date it won’t work. So for me I think having an automation run daily is a better option. (Unless Drafts can recognise date strings as dates so that you could have it search for tickler dates equal to or earlier than today?)
go for it there is a pretty good url scheme link builder for Things online here let us know if you can figure it out.
This should be possible but would also require you to delete the tickler string from drafts that you don’t want to be returned to your inbox again I can have a look and extend the action if you want to go that route
This is really good and I love both the idea and the implementation. I added a few tweaks to ensure it fits with my workspace and hashtag practices.
I would prefer it to run every day at a specified time and have created an automation to do that. I can’t see why this wouldn’t be better - have I missed something?
You didn’t miss anything - it might work with a scheduled automation without issues.
You need to try that and see if it works consistently. Background automations are limited with memory and whatever magic.
I had issues importing my Readwise highlights with a background automation so I did it when I open drafts. This usecase might work so just try it
I tried it and it doesn’t work so I’ll try opening Drafts on a schedule tomorrow. Thank you for responding and for the actions.
I have just found a notification that the automation was denied access to Drafts because my device was locked so I guess simply opening Drafts won’t work either.
Just FYI, these background action intents do not run in an intent extension, they still run in the app itself, just in the background–so should not have problems with memory limits. They could hit timeouts if it’s an action that takes a particularly long time to complete and Shortcuts decides it doesn’t want to wait anymore, but I don’t think that’s too likely to come up.
