Updated 07142022-193752
Drafts made it too easy to dump my thoughts into text.
I have too many drafts to handle. I tried to Merge them, file them into Obsidian, act on them but I have since given up. Sometimes, I tell myself that it might just be easier to tag them in Drafts and keep them into Workspaces i.e. using Drafts as my filing system instead. The Search is pretty good anyway.
I know I should make it a habit to review my drafts at the end of the day to move them to it’s appropriate system. Often, I find myself too exhausted at the end of the day that I just want to close the computer and call it a day. Then, they start to pile up.
What is the best practice? -“I have too many drafts to handle!” - Drafts Community Forums
In the eighth post of the thread hyperlinked above, Drafts Config All-Star FlohGro expressed curiosity about my own management of Drafts in response to my initial reply, which I was naturally very flattered by. I’m not sure it would’ve occurred to me to attempt a straightforward guide exclusively on my own (file) management practices in Drafts had I not engaged with this thread, but my setup as it metamorphosed in the past year might actually be worth such a thing, come to think of it.
Having used Drafts so long, it’s notable that I can still remember being originally put off by most of its notes management methods at first, especially Workspaces. Unfortunately, I couldn’t tell you how I originally dealt with them as I’ve flushed the entirety of my Drafts library at least three or four times since1. Over the years, I’ve come to prefer Workspaces and Tagging in Drafts over just about any other method of notes organization for my text living space.
Also worthy of note - if you weren’t already aware - is the fact that I am primarily a Drafts user on my iPhone 12 Pro Max with a paired Bluetooth keyboard. This includes many special considerations. Along with Drafts’ support of TextExpander, its malleable keyboard shortcuts are why I now use Drafts to launch into a significant number of non-Drafts-related tasks/locations. From Google searches to calling Siri Shortcuts, starting in Drafts allows me to attach keyboard shortcuts to a whole bunch of commands to which I’d be otherwise unable to.
You can view a recent result of the Drafts Library Summary action on my personal library here. It shows a total tag count of 200 even, which is a bit excessive and not entirely reflective of the number of these I actually use. Most of my personal workspaces can be viewed/downloaded via links in the README of this GitHub repository, though they’re not going to be very useful beyond inspection. In terms of priority, their assigned keyboard shortcuts should be the most telling. “Hole” is as near as makes no difference to a pure chronological list of all drafts, sorted by modification date, which often comes in handy when I need to find an untagged draft created from elsewhere or when I just feel the need to see all my most recently-modified drafts ordered as such.
You’ll note that most of my workspaces include the default sorting options - that is, displaying flagged drafts at the top of the list under all conditions, and under all conditions, sorting the rest by modification date. One notable exception is my Vocabulary workspace, which is sorted alphabetically.
Sortof like Federico Viticci’s “dashboard” note in Obsidian, I’ve been using a single Draft as my launching-off point for the command line-esque functions described above. I’ve assigned it ⌥0 via a single action in my “Switcher” Workspace, enabled by the magic of UUIDs, which we’ll get into later.
[1] Not out of necessity, I should say.
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