Link Draft with item in Things and vice versa

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#1

I’ve recently tried an idea I had of creating a draft with some basic details, and then creating a item in things with the same detail, and set a due date. Then I keep notes in the Draft and can see the item in Things for upcoming meetings. What I’d like to do is copy some text to the clipboard, then create a draft and an item in Things and have a link to the draft in the item, and a link to the item in the draft. So I can easily flip back and forth between the two. Hopefully this makes sense and isn’t too silly. Thanks!

Matthew

#2

Not silly at all! This should be possible using URL schemes. You could probably build this either as a shortcut or a Drafts action. Would you have a preference?

Also, what would you like to do with the contents of the clipboard? Is that the title of the item?

#3

Turns out this is achievable with only a few shortcuts actions. Here’s a link to an example shortcut I made. This one prompts for input, then creates a task in Things and a draft in Drafts with links to each other. I chose to show the Things task at the end, but you could easily change this to open the draft instead. Or you could show neither.

It would also be easy to integrate the clipboard into this somewhere, so do reply if I can help you do this.

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#4

Wow!! Thanks so much. I’ll be testing here shortly but wanted to quickly post my thanks, this will be so helpful for my particular workflow. Will update again once I’ve had a chance to play. Thanks again.

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#5

It worked perfectly, thank you very much!

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#6

This is interesting, but I get a message from Shortcuts that it only works with Things 3 on the iPad. Does it not work on iPhones?

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#7

I’d forgotten about this. It’s a rather annoying feature of Things that their app is not “universal”. This means that the iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps count as three separate apps. It’s fair enough that their business model involves selling the three versions for different prices (which wouldn’t be possible with a universal app), but is has these negative consequences for users.

The workaround is just to recreate the shortcut on the iPhone using the shortcuts from the iPhone version. Here’s a link to that shortcut. You could also combine these into a single shortcut using an if statement which checks the device name and runs either shortcut accordingly:

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#8

Thanks, it works on iPhone now.

I figured that I would need to recreate the action steps for the iPhone version, but the problem was I didn’t know which actions to create. It wasn’t possible to edit. Shortcuts would only let me remove the incompatible action without revealing what it did :triumph:

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