Transcription
I use the app Drafts for all of my writing. Whether I'm just like taking notes for a meeting, or doing some research, or writing down like a little text snippet for something I need to save for later, or writing a script for a video, I do all of my writing in Drafts. And I've been doing this for years now.
And over that time, I've come up with a ton of tips for using the app. I wanted to share them all with you. This video is sponsored by Babbel. Now, full disclosure, Drafts has sponsored some videos in the past. They are not sponsoring this video at all. If you've watched my videos in the past, you know I'm a true day-to-day life user of the app. And I just wanted to make a video about all the tips and tricks that I've accumulated using the app over the years.
So there's a few different reasons why I use the app Drafts. One, it's just super quick to get text into. I'll talk about that a little more later. But I, I find a lot of like bigger, heavier note-taking apps, especially some of the really popular ones right now, they take a minute to like get into because they're like super heavily focused on organization and having subfolders and all these different things. But Drafts is just really easy. If I have something in my brain and I'm, you know, at Costco or something, I can just write that in Drafts, save it for later, and deal with it when I get home.
The second thing is it has amazing automation support. Not just on the external side. I talk a lot on this channel about Shortcuts and using Shortcuts. But it also has built-in automations in the form of what, what Drafts calls Actions. Um, and these are really handy and work really well. And there's a lot to it.
And then the third reason is it's just an amazing app. It's an extremely well-built app.
This video is sponsored by Babbel. Babbel is an excellent service for learning another language. Babbel teaches real-world practical conversation, whether it's for traveling or business, or you're just meeting new people. This is an excellent way to learn a new language. The lessons are really short, they're about 10 minutes a piece, and they're interactive, which is perfect for me. I'm somebody that's hands-on. Like, if I'm not doing a thing, I won't remember what I'm trying to learn. I have to be interacting with it, and that's what this is.
So one of my goals for next summer is to go to Italy. I really want to go to Italy. It's just like a great place, great culture, history, beautiful place to take photos. I really want to go. So, uh, I just started using Babbel and I am learning Italian. And part of that is I'm going through the different lesson plans. Now, I've only gone through two so far, but the two I've gone through have been really good, super interactive, and I've gotten quite a bit out of it. And I could say some key words like "buongiorno" and "grazie." My goal is to do a few lessons a week. So when I do go to Italy, I can speak Italian without, you know, looking silly. Speak a new language in three weeks with Babbel. Use the link in the description below to get up to 65% off your subscription. My thanks to Babbel for sponsoring this video.
So the first thing I do is I write everything in Markdown. But Markdown is a way to quickly write and format plain text. So you could do things like headings, bold, italicized, but also do things like lists, checklists, and like insert like URL links. And then you can export it as rich text or PDFs, and it formats everything really nicely.
There's a lot of benefits to writing in Markdown, or just writing in plain text. One, it's really fast, and you can take it from one application to another, and you don't have to worry about formatting. Uh, if you ever like copy something from the web and like try and paste it into an email and like the formatting is really off, rich text is causing that issue. Plain text gets the benefit of there is no formatting. There is no like, like format to it that it's trying to uphold from one app to another. So you can move it from one to another, and it just looks fine.
I'm gonna put links to everything I mentioned in the description below. But alongside that, I'm gonna put a link to a website that describes Markdown, what it is, and how you can learn it.
For Drafts, I use a custom theme. This is something that was implemented, I want to say a year ago, but timelines, who can even remember? Custom themes are now built into Drafts. So you can go to the Drafts Action Directory, where here they have all their actions, themes, syntaxes. If you want to use something other than Markdown, like I said, I use Markdown for everything, but there's a ton of other syntaxes you can use with Drafts. But for the theme-wise, I'm using one called Dark Knight, and it was made by me. I absolutely love the way this theme turned out. Now, it's actually based on a theme my friend Matt Birchler made. And this theme is totally available to download for free. You can, you can just get it right from their website and install it.
What I liked about Matt's theme is the, the color scheme and how dark mode worked to get really well together with its color scheme. But it was very heavily focused on red colors. I wanted one that was focused on blue colors. So that's what I made this for.
I also use another app called Font Case. And what this allows you to do on iPads and iPhones, you don't need this on the Mac, but just on the iPhone and the iPad, it allows you to install third-party fonts. So I installed a, this is another free thing that you can download, a font called JetBrains Mono. This is a monospace font. Absolutely love the way this font looks. Reads like it's just, it's the perfect font for note-taking. So, uh, I installed that and I made that the default theme in Drafts. And you could do that through the appearance settings, right where you pick the themes.
One of my favorite recent features about Drafts is the ability to link two different drafts together. Now, this is something that is like burning through all note-taking apps is the ability to do some kind of linking between notes. And Drafts does it in a very similar, uh, way that like apps like Obsidian do. This is you type two open brackets, and then you get a dropdown menu. You can start typing your note name, or you can select it right then from the list. And once you pick the draft, it will then fill out two close brackets, and then it'll look like a highlighted link. You can tap on that, and it'll then jump to that note.
This is really cool. I use this a lot. Specifically, I have one document I call Launchpad. And basically, this has all the stuff that I'm working on, whether it's personal projects, work stuff, long-term projects. I love this because what this does is it gives me a dashboard for everything that I'm working on. So what I do is I open this every morning. In fact, what I do is I have a shortcut in my dock that I can tap, and this is a one-action shortcut. And all it does is open this draft. So I tap on this, and it launches Launchpad. Really handy.
In this document, I also have external Markdown links down at the bottom. This is a "stuff to check out" area. I have another shortcut that I'll talk about a little later that I use to add stuff to this section. Honestly, this is just for like cool things that I would like to check out, kind of highlight, but I just didn't have time when I saw them originally. But yeah, you can use this to link different drafts together, different projects, whatever you're working on. You can use these, these linking features, these brackets to link different drafts together. Such an incredibly handy, important feature to the way I work.
One thing I do wish is it had proper backlinking. So it apps like Obsidian and Craft, if you do these kinds of like linked to other notes, and the note that you link to, so you have note one, you link to note two. Then in note two, it has like a section called backlinking where you can see all the notes that are linked to note two. So in there, you would see note one. Hopefully that makes sense. I would like to see that in Drafts, but it's not a deal-breaker feature that it's not there for me.
One of the really cool things about Drafts is just how quick it is to jump into it and start adding something. It's, it's just a quick entry feature. So the idea behind Drafts is when you open it, and if you haven't opened it within the last 60 seconds, it automatically opens a new draft. And I love this feature on my iPhone. Like I talked about earlier, like maybe I'm in Costco or like grocery shopping or out and about, or just like I'm not sitting at my desk here or my work area like working. I just like have the thought pop in or I need to write something down really quick. I use this to just quickly jot it down, and I'll deal with it later.
But on my iPad, I don't like this feature because I'm usually like working in one specific draft a lot. But I'm jumping between like web pages and documents and all that stuff. So what you could do is there is a pen icon. So down at the bottom, if it's, if you select it, it'll kind of become solid. If it's solid, that means this draft will stay open until you close it and go to another draft or create a new draft or whatever. It just always stays on the last open draft. I leave this on on my iPad, but I don't leave it on on my iPhone. I leave it off on my iPhone, and I think that's just kind of like the way it works best on both of these platforms.
One of the areas I think Drafts could do a little better at is organization of notes. So the main system is using tags and workspaces. So I have a few different tags I use, like scripts, project, admin, personal, like that kind of stuff. They're all very generic. I don't get really specific with my tags. I keep everything really generic. And then what you could do is you can go into the workspace management area and you can create workspaces. And what you do is you can name them like projects, or admin, personal, scripts, whatever you want. You can name them whatever works for you. And then you can associate tags with them. And you can associate as many tags as you want. You just use a comma to separate them. So what I do a lot is I'll put the singular and plural version. So I'll have project, comma, projects. That way, if I'm tagging something, I don't have to remember, oh, did I do singular or plural? Or like, maybe my brain just freezes and I would type the singular and I meant to do the plural or whatever.
With workspaces, this is kind of like a folder structure almost. So you can hit the dropdown menu and you can pick from a workspace. And what this does is it, once you have these workspaces built, it will filter out any drafts that don't meet the tags that are for that specific workspace. So again, if I pick projects, it will filter all the drafts that have the tag for the projects workspace. So in my case, that's project and projects.
Now, I do have one workspace that doesn't use tags, and that's Inbox. If you look at the way this is set up, it actually says untagged here. So what that'll do is that'll take any drafts that don't have a tag, they put them in the inbox. And this is kind of like my catch-all area. Like when I'm quickly capturing something, I don't tag it, I just leave it in the inbox. So when I get back to my computer, my iPad, my Mac, whatever, I can sit there and go through that. Or if I just have like a text snippet I just need for like a couple of hours or a day or so, I just leave it in the inbox there. And then I can just jump to it, grab it, and then, you know, when I'm done with it, I can delete it.
So if you don't want to go through all the work to set up workspaces to like organize and filter Drafts or anything like that, and I totally get it because it is a little bit of work, you can use the shortcut Command Shift F. Or on like the iPhone and iPad, you can just pull down where the note is. And this gives you kind of a search feature. This allows you to search for any draft, whether it's the content of the draft, the title of the draft, whatever you're looking for, you can just search for it right there. It's a really quick way to get to something specific that you want.
Now, technically, Drafts does work with the system feature Spotlight. So if you hit Command Space, whether on a Mac or an iPad, or if you pull down on the home screen on an iPhone, you can type out a Draft title and it should show that draft. My issue that I've ran into with it in the past is that if the title's really generic, say "keyboard," that could be just generic enough that Spotlight doesn't know to pull up Drafts first, and it could show a whole bunch of results before it ever shows the draft, if it shows the draft at all. So that Command F shortcut, or just pulling down on the note section area, that's just a really handy shortcut to kind of like jump between your notes. Honestly, I use the workspaces feature and that kind of in combination to quickly move around Drafts.
One thing that I struggled with when using Drafts first is the difference between archiving and deleting. So there is a trash folder and there is an archive folder. And the way I've kind of come down to deciding on how I'm going to use either one of them is archive is for big stuff that I might want to reference again in the future. So scripts, projects, research notes on maybe like an iOS release or an app or something like that. And then stuff I delete is like text snippets, like temporary stuff. Like, oh, hey, I needed this like six-digit code to log into something. Or yeah, like, like, just little snippets of stuff that I'm just gonna, it's like one-off things that I'm never gonna use again.
So there's actually a couple of really cool features that are built into Drafts. I don't think a lot of people know about. First is Scribble. Well, Scribble just might be a feature that was forgotten about by everybody. It was the big iPadOS 14 feature. It was the ability to take the Apple Pencil and handwrite out in like a text area and convert your handwriting to typed text. I don't do this a lot, but I do find this kind of handy when I am using the Apple Pencil and I just want to take like a quick note. I can just shift over to Drafts. I have the Apple Pencil in hand. I have like the paper like on my iPad. So I get that nice feeling of like when I'm working with the two together, I get that kind of like pencil and paper feeling that's just kind of nice. So I can just handwrite those out. It works well together. Full disclosure, Paperlike has is a channel sponsor, but I do use the two together. So yeah, disclosure there. But, um, it's a nice feature that it's there. It's not like the killer end-all be-all thing, but it's something I wanted to mention.
Another feature that I don't think a lot of people know about is version history. Version history is such a cool, uh, feature and it saved my butt a few times. Basically, what this is is as you make changes to your document, Drafts saves those changes in the background. So if you like really mess up a document really bad, you're like, oh man, I lost all this work. Never fear. You can actually go into the Drafts info panel and you can pull up different versions of your draft and then you can restore that draft. So nice. Seriously, this has saved me so many times. Like this is a key feature for any notes app going forward that is like a must-have for me is some kind of versioning.
Then there's the Arrange feature. This is another really cool feature. So down at the bottom, you'll see two arrows going up and down. You can tap on that, and what this does is it breaks your draft up into different sections. You can do this line by line, you can do this by like headings, however you want. You can then drag and drop those blocks of text in different areas. So like that big iPadOS walkthrough video I do every year, like what's on my iPad video, like what I will use this feature to arrange those scripts around. Like so I can kind of find the optimal order to talk about. But as I'm writing them, I'm not worried about like, oh man, am I going to have to like move this section and like get into this weird copy and paste like, like, you know, like, oh, I cut this, now I gotta scroll and find where it goes. Nope, you just take it and you drag and drop where you want it to go.
There's also a really nice feature and this is on the iPad. There is a box down at the bottom with the arrow pointing out. If you tap that, it will take your current draft and preview it out into rich text. So you can see basically the Markdown all nicely formatted out with links that are selectable, bullet points, all that stuff.
Then another feature is enabling links. So by default, if you paste a Markdown link or any kind of link in Drafts, you can't tap on it and and jump to that link because you think of it as it's an editor, it's not, you know, previewing out that rich text or anything like that. This is where you're writing out your, your, your draft, your document. So you can tap on the link button at the bottom, and that will then make all the links selectable. Now, you don't need that link button for linking to other drafts to be able to select that. This is just for like external URL links, like going to a website or, you know, linking to an app or something that's outside of Drafts.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to actually make a part two to this video because there is a whole big section of actions and automations that you can do with Drafts. Uh, and I realize this video is already going kind of long. So if you want to see more about Drafts, be sure to subscribe. But basically, to give the short statement, kind of like the preview, the tease, actions allow you to do automations inside Drafts. So you could do things like manipulate text, manipulate the whole draft, you can use JavaScript, Shortcuts, all sorts of different things. I use these for templates.
Drafts has an Action Directory. I'll put a link to it in the description below. This is stuff the community makes. You can go there, check it out, download them, run them, see, see how, see if they work for you. And all of them are moddable. So like, you can edit any one of those actions that's on there. So if it doesn't do exactly what you want, you can change it.
Drafts also has excellent Shortcuts support. So if you're like me and use Shortcuts, that is a huge key thing for me. So like I use Shortcuts for inputting text, but not just like inputting a note, like grabbing the link of the Safari window that's opening and putting it in a nice Markdown formatted way. Uh, that "stuff to check out" area in my Launchpad, that's what I use that for. I have a shortcut that automatically adds that URL with text into that area.
Drafts has been key to the way I do my job for years. Not even just like YouTube stuff and running my business, but even when I had my IT day job, like I used Drafts for that. It was, it's just been key for to like the way I run my life. I'm somebody that likes to take a lot of notes. I need to take a lot of notes to remember proper things, and Drafts has helped me with that.
My thanks to Babbel for sponsoring this video. If you liked the video, hit the thumbs up button. Subscribe if you haven't already, and have a great day.