Example actions and other extensions for Drafts, the quick-capture notes app.

This past month I attended my first conference of the year. It was actually a forum of several hundred people, but I have a couple of other similar events coming up. A two day exhibition at the London Expo this coming month and an SAP HR event in May. At this first event all of the non-networking events were taking place in a single large room and I just captured everything on my phone and my work laptop. The next events however are going to be bigger venues with multiple locations for sessions, and even though my laptop is pretty light I’d like to travel lighter still. Dumping the laptop, spare USB C battery pack & cable and replacing them with my iPad and a keyboard (but keeping my iPhone) would be better. To that end I set about coming up with a new workflow for capturing information at conferences.

Evernote’s web clipper extension for OS X Safari is a thing of beauty. The Evernote bookmarklet clipper (on iOS and OS X) is a slow piece of crap.

Drafts, by AgileTortoise, is my ubiquitous note app. I use it for capturing ideas, drafting content, shopping lists, general note taking, and more besides. The content is often temporary, but when it isn’t, the content gets reflowed off into files (such as in one of my Obsidian vaults), social media posts, e-mails, or some other channel. Last year I also began using another note app - Tot by the IconFactory. Tot has a very different view of notes. It is a much simpler app and is opinionated in how complex it can get. But, what it gave me on the Mac was a free menu bar app that I could keep snippets on for short periods. In real world terms, I think of Drafts as my ubiquitous pocket notebook, and Tot as the pad of last few sticky notes on my desk. There is undoubtedly overlap, and I am sure I could make Drafts provide near identical functionality to Tot. However, having a distinction between them works for me, and having Tot as a separate app to fulfil a niche requirement in my workflows has stuck. The only friction that occurred is where I wanted to transfer information between the two apps. But I’ve been able to smooth that over and I’m going to explain how in the remainder of this post.

Extract a checklist from a Drafts document and import it into Things 3.

Example actions and other extensions for Drafts, the quick-capture notes app.

Example actions and other extensions for Drafts, the quick-capture notes app.

Example actions and other extensions for Drafts, the quick-capture notes app.

Example actions and other extensions for Drafts, the quick-capture notes app.

Example actions and other extensions for Drafts, the quick-capture notes app.

Example actions and other extensions for Drafts, the quick-capture notes app.

Example actions and other extensions for Drafts, the quick-capture notes app.

Example actions and other extensions for Drafts, the quick-capture notes app.

Example actions and other extensions for Drafts, the quick-capture notes app.

Example actions and other extensions for Drafts, the quick-capture notes app.

Example actions and other extensions for Drafts, the quick-capture notes app.

Example actions and other extensions for Drafts, the quick-capture notes app.

Example actions and other extensions for Drafts, the quick-capture notes app.

Example actions and other extensions for Drafts, the quick-capture notes app.

Example actions and other extensions for Drafts, the quick-capture notes app.

Example actions and other extensions for Drafts, the quick-capture notes app.

Example actions and other extensions for Drafts, the quick-capture notes app.

Example actions and other extensions for Drafts, the quick-capture notes app.

Example actions and other extensions for Drafts, the quick-capture notes app.

Example actions and other extensions for Drafts, the quick-capture notes app.

Example actions and other extensions for Drafts, the quick-capture notes app.

Example actions and other extensions for Drafts, the quick-capture notes app.

Example actions and other extensions for Drafts, the quick-capture notes app.

Example actions and other extensions for Drafts, the quick-capture notes app.