I was wondering how people use Drafts as mostly a quick capture tool. I always get hung up on what to do with individual drafts, do I store them, organize them, delete them after they’re sent off to the final destination? So far I’ve ended up with a very cluttered list of random drafts and it seems messy. I use Drafts across iOS, iPADOS and MacOS with my main destinations being Obsidian and Todoist.
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As the app developer, I may not be the best example of a user, but I can tell you how my own usage shakes out. I do use Drafts much the way I originally intended, as a quick capture tool, with a few exceptions. Stuff I capture in Drafts shakes out in a few ways:
- Ephemeral stuff. Notes I jot down for temporary use, usually just get trashed when I’m done with them - things like dimensions I need to remember as long as a trip to the Home Depot, or a rental car license plate, etc.
- Things that go elsewhere. I start a lot in Drafts because I like it for capture/editing that become emails, messages, social media posts, tasks, etc. When acted on, these get archived – usually automatically by having the actions configured to archive the draft with the “After Success” setting (often also getting tagged automatically - like if I post to Mastodon, the action assigns a “mastodon” tag and archives the draft).
- Things I keep in Drafts. There are a few cases where I actually keep and organize things in Drafts, like reusable text snippets, running lists of movies/books, grocery lists. In these cases, the related drafts live in the archive, are tagged, and I have workspaces that filter the draft list to show only those drafts.
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Very helpful, do you typically write your actions to automatically delete and/or archive drafts?
As a longtime user, I’ve seen the addition of more features to support a larger user base with unique use cases. But the app still feels light and flexible, albeit sometimes daunting.
BTW, I was hoping you’d reply, thanks 
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I use Drafts almost exclusively as quick capture:
- Temporary notes, including details that I jot down solely to process them with actions immediately
- Write something down (or dictate!) and move it later (often to NotePlan)
- Collections of material (eg, quotes) I gather for a while and then process with actions when I get enough
In theory I delete the notes that I don’t need anymore and archive the important ones. In practice… I don’t. I have 6,674 drafts in the app right now, just over 700 archived… doesn’t seem to affect responsiveness or search. So I just go with it. (As you can guess, I’m also not the Inbox Zero type with email.)
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My uses are quite simple really. I probably could use Drafts more in my daily life. However, I tend to just copy and paste passages of interest into Drafts, and I simply organise right now by adding tags. For example, I will add one-liners to Drafts, and I simply tag those under ‘humor’.
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My Quick Capture Workflow for drafts is 90% done with this action group On My Mind Action Group
I also use drafts as long term storage for notes since it has everything I need (or I can script it) as a note making tool 
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I just started looking at your OMM action group and it is very impressive. Thank you for sharing.
I have encountered a problem processing the OMM Draft which isn’t a problem with the action group itself but I hope you can point me in the direction of a solution.
When I process multiple chunks and select “add to list” for each one, the “add to list” action is called but doesn’t show the chunk being processed so selecting the correct list is difficult. Apart from processing each chunk individually, is there anything else I should look at.
Thanks
Ian
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I have used Apple Notes for this and am wondering what advantages Drafts might have over the former?
Drafts with its extra features looks like it should have an advantage, but so far I can’t seem to find a compelling one. There ARE rare cases where I want to run a script to reformat things, and Drafts could do this, but it doesn’t seem to save much effort, if any.
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Different people are using Drafts in different ways, so it may simply be that the way you use Drafts doesn’t offer you any advantages.
For me Drafts very much functions like a digital inbox for capturing and processing information. For me only a relatively small amount of content is retained long term in Drafts. I have specific workspaces for those things and they tend to allow me to drive step by step automation or references for things that I work on in Drafts.
Speed
Most of my content is captured via text or voice entry. Drafts used to be way faster to launch and start entering content than Notes, and I think still is in most cases (you can set Drafts to open and be ready with a new Draft primed for capture), though I would concede the addition of the Quick Note feature on iPad and Mac reduces or eliminates Drafts’ speed advantage there.
However I think on the iPhone and Apple Watch it remains faster via Drafts than Notes - for me at least.
Channels
Text, voice capture, and OCR transcription are options for Notes too, and Notes also allows for sketching (and attachments), which Drafts does not. But Drafts does have several other options:
Mail Drop
The Mail Drop functionality lets you send content to Drafts via a unique e-mail address. This can be used from an e-mail account or from web services allowing for automated quick capture.
Auto Import from Reminders
I used to make more use of this before Siri support for third party apps improved, but there are some web services out there that integrate with Reminders, and so can potentially offer another route into Drafts for quick capture as Drafts can automatically import from Reminders.
Auto File Import
Drafts can automatically import content from text files in a specific folder. This makes linking up with Folder Actions or Hazel on the Mac to drive import into Drafts easy and efficient for file-based content. I don’t use this a lot, but occasionally I have a bunch of Markdown documents that I want to get into Drafts for processing and I’ll use this to quickly get them in.
File Ingestion
Drafts includes options to grab text from non-text files, including audio files, video files, and PDFs. I’ve used the audio and video options a couple of times and they have been quite useful, and certainly faster than typing the content by hand or loading into another app to get the content to then get it out into Drafts to process.
Web Capture
This last one isn’t the share extension, but rather the web interface and bookmarklet options for sending content to Drafts. Something I utilise when I am on my work PC when I come across something interesting for later is to send it off into Drafts via that service. As someone who has a foot in several operating systems, I truly appreciate this one.
Safari Web Capture Template
Being able to tailor the web capture template for Safari means you can capture the information you want in the way you want it rather than living with the default - which may not be as suitable for your purposes.
Hopefully, the features above focused around capture should give you an indication of some of the advantages Drafts has over Notes in a general sense. But if you would never use any of them, and are happy with the difference in speed, then perhaps Notes is a better tool for you for your quick capture.
However, with this subsequent paragraph, you note things like running scripts to do things like reformat content and that it does not save you much time. This would suggest you have very simple processing needs, and that the types of processing you do won’t save much time for you through applying automation. Drafts is incredibly flexible and you can build sophisticated automations that do complex things with the content or with web services. A popular example right now is utilising AI services to work with existing text (e.g. spell & grammar check, summarise) or to generate new text from a prompt.
Obviously the advent of Apple intelligence will impact on this as a whole, but this is simply presented as an example right now.
If you have not done so yet, you should browse through the actions listed in the Directory. Drafts comes with some standard ones, but there are thousands more available. Maybe start with the most popular actions and action groups and see what’s available to get some insight into how actions can save you more time.
For example, if you had a list of 100 names in a note, Using a Drafts action to sort them alphabetically would save you more than a little effort.
The follow on to all this is that even if you don’t have sophisticated workflow processing needs today (maybe you have never needed to sort 100 names), you may tomorrow, and at that point it may be worth more serious consideration of Drafts over Notes.
As a final and broader scoped point, you may wish to research online about the Notes’ content format and compare it to the well documented pros and cons of plain text formats such as Markdown and Taskpaper (both examples supported by Drafts). Many people have developed a preference for open plain text content options over rich content formats and over proprietary formats. Interoperability and longevity are things some people prioritise on considering their toolset.
With any luck that gives you some insights into where Drafts is more capable than Notes (and where it is not - Drafts is plain text only, not multi media like Notes), as well as some sense of how Drafts’ features can save you a lot of time, if and when you have a need for them.
Finally, I would like to be clear that I use both Notes and Drafts, and that you may find parallel uses.
As I set out above, Drafts is my digital inbox and content processing tool. It is my quick capture tool and it is a far better choice for my use cases than Notes. I’m in it multiple times a day, every day.
On the other hand, Notes gets more occasional use. I use it mainly for shared content with family members such as gift ideas and details for mini-projects (e.g. a home improvement project - contact details quotes for some builders, shopping list for the DIY shop, links to Ikea products we’re comparing, etc.). This is something that Drafts isn’t able to do and that Notes (only because we all have the convenience of owning an Apple device) is well suited to - particularly because we want images and other files (like PDFs) embedded in the Notes, and I haven’t convinced my family members to learn Markdown syntax (yet 
).
Hope that’s useful.
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