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?)