How To Use Drafts With Todoist
This is a game changer for Drafts and Todoist users
Continuing my writing about Drafts, it’s important to be clear that I am not a developer. I have next to zero coding skills, so I need to look elsewhere for ways to automate and improve my processes.
One of those is the use of Actions, with Drafts.
From the Drafts website:
In Drafts, Actions are commands used to output to other services and apps, manipulate the text in drafts, and much more. They can take many forms, from simple helper actions that insert text, or special characters, to full-blown scripted integrations with web services to output text.
Most of the Actions I use are either built-in or installed from the Drafts Directory; a place where people cleverer than me have written Actions for specific purposes.
I may not be a coder, but I am able to manipulate or amend an Action, to fit my needs, once I have the base to work from. That’s one of the benefits of being a Drafts Pro user. The subscription allows you to edit the Actions.
Here’s an example of some of the Actions I use:
- Submitting entries to my Day One journal
- Save a Draft as a Google Doc
- Send a single tweet or Twitter thread
- Send messages via WhatsApp
The one Action I really wanted was the ability to add tasks to a Draft and then add it to Todoist.
Evernote
I used to be an Evernote user, and they have now introduced tasks to their app. This means you can have a note full of information, and add tasks to the note. These show up in a separate area of the app and when you click on a task, it will take you to the note, so you have the full context.
I stopped using Evernote because it’s become bloated, and unwieldy to use.
I wanted a way to do the same thing in Drafts, and as I’ve already said, writing it myself was a non-starter.
The One That I Want
I found an Action, and it’s exactly what I was looking for.
This Action was written by ‘@joshbduncan; it’s called ‘Send Markdown To-dos to Todoist’ and can be found in the Drafts Directory.
How it works
- Add a checkbox. Being a markdown editor, in Drafts, they look like this -[ ] I have a snippet in Alfred (ztd) that adds the checkbox for me.
- Type the name of the task. In fact, that’s all you actually need. Run the action and this will go straight to your Todoist Inbox.
The Power
- To add task attributes, use two forward slashes // then enter any, or all, of the following: #project name, priority, due date, and @tags. You can even add the date in natural language and it’s parsed as if it was added directly to Todoist.
- Repeat a new line for each task as necessary. The Action will iterate over them all.
- Run the Action.
- The Draft will have the Todoist tag added and, conversely, in Todoist the ‘@drafts label is applied.
- Select if you want to Archive or Trash the draft. It may be that you just created a task in a Draft and that’s it; so you can Trash it. If you want to keep it, send it to the Archive. Alternatively, do nothing and the task will sit there.
This is ideal if you are taking action during a meeting. The tasks remain on the note, and you have the context when you return to take action.
To help with this, in Todoist the task is created as a link to the original Draft. Obviously, this isn’t useful if you’ve deleted the draft, but otherwise, it gives a quick link back to the original draft, and all the related context.
One other thing I do is to mark the task as complete, in the Draft. This means that if I add another task later when I run the Action then I won’t get a duplicate of the first one.
An example of how to write a task would look like this:
- [ ]This is a new task//#project @label p3 tomorrow at 10am
The beauty is that the tasks can be created throughout a document, which means I can add them as I go, and they don’t need to be in a specific section, or grouped together. There’s total flexibility.
I can now create tasks in Todoist, which is quite literally where I run my life, and have the full context of the original note (if there is one).
I love finding ways to improve my productivity and efficiency, and this is just another way to keep me flowing through the day.
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