How To Level Up Your Productivity

I’m reviewing the situation

In a recent story, I wrote about Drafts and how it’s become even more powerful in my workflow so I wanted to share, in-depth, a real-world example of how it works for me.

At work, I’m the head of an analysis team and run regular check-ins with each of my team members.

It’s fairly straightforward, but I wanted a templated document to use to capture notes, and then somewhere to store them after the meeting so that I can refer back to them.

I had started with Apple Notes, using Alfred to run a quick routine to launch a pop-up to capture the name, then open a new note and populate a template for the meeting.

This was OK, but it left me wanting.

I wanted to be able to see the previous 1–2–1 notes, and these aren’t accessible easily with Apple Notes.

Step up Drafts.

There’s an abundance of calls that can be used with Drafts.

Programmatically you can: - create a draft - file a draft - get a draft using the UUID - get a draft from a Workspace - open a draft - process a template - run an action on a draft

and much more. I think you get the picture.

Using the Apple Shortcuts app, I have created a whole routine, which started with first creating a template in Drafts, that I want to use for the review.

By using the tag ‘template’, within the Drafts app, this is then identified at runtime.

NB: If you have multiple templates, you’ll need to select which one you want at the point of running the shortcut.

These are the steps I followed:

1. First up, run a prompt to capture the name of the team member, and set that name as a variable.
2. Next, run an action to create a new draft from the template.
3. I then use the name variable to search for other Drafts for that person, which are saved in the archive.
4. Get the text from the previous Drafts and save them to another variable.
5. Almost there. Get the newly created Draft and append this text.
6. Finally, add the name variable to the top of the Draft.

It works very well.

I run this before the meeting and remind myself of what we talked about last time.

I use markdown to format the text, with headings and bullet points as needed.

Once the meeting is finished, there is one last Action that I run in Drafts, to save it as a Google Doc, in Drive.

This automatically populates the date in the filename along with the name of the team member.

The markdown formatting is beautifully translated, and when you review the document, it looks quite smart. I’m sure I could make it look even better.

The only thing I haven’t done is automatically put this file into a specific folder in Google Drive. That would be the cherry on top, but I’m happy for the moment.

Maybe I’ll try and do that another day.

One last thing.

I added a keyboard shortcut and added it to a button on my Stream Deck. Now, preparing for a review is just one click away.

It’s silly, but it’s one more timesaver. I called it Review Time and it kicks off the routine — based on the keyboard shortcut I assigned to the Shortcut.

This has been a game-changer for me.

It’s one example of how automation can save time and improve the efficiency of running multiple review meetings every week.

I continue to see what else I can do to speed things up.

What automation, if any, do you use?

Thank you for reading

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