I made a video about how I use Drafts to do a GTD style brain dump and then send those action items to OmniFocus. This version prompts me with a trigger list so I don’t forget about the critical areas of my life that are not front and center at the moment.

Video

Brain Dump Prompts

Action Odessy

For some reason, I like having my tasks in title case. I can easily do this on my Mac using Keyboard Maestro, but I want this process to be the same no matter what device I’m using. So I first went through and found an action that will convert the selected text to Title Case.

Title

But it only worked on the selected text, so I had to find another action that would select all the text in the draft first and then run the title case action.

Select All

Combining these two scripts took everything that was in the draft and made it title case. Then I had to figure out how to take that title case list of tasks and move it to OmniFocus.

I already had a super helpful action made by Rosemary Orchard for capturing action items from meeting notes; I figured it was an excellent place to start. I just had to edit the code to look for lines that did not start with # instead of lines that began with the standard markdown task format.

Markdown Tasks to OmniFocus

Unfortunately, I am in chapter 1 of the Eloquent JavaScript book, so I had no idea how to do this. I posted to the Drafts forums.

Within hours, the developer of Drafts posted the code I needed, and (of course) it worked perfectly!

GTD Brain Dump to OmniFocus

Yet another reason to love the app!

Assembled Action

In the end, I assembled these parts into one action, which I posted to the Action Directory:

Move Brain Dump to OmniFocus

Conclusion

I learned more about Drafts and JavaScript while also making something to help me be more productive. Quite the productive day, If I do say so my self.

Please post a comment below with something I overlooked and should add to my trigger list!