As I have explained before, I try to deal with stressful situations by planning ahead, most often through checklists or automations.

Deciding to keep my sick kid home from school and communicating with his teacher(s) and the staff quickly is just such a situation. I have created two Drafts accounts to help me in those times.

Video

Drafts Resources

There are a few Drafts resources that would be helpful in implementing a solution like this for yourself.

Markdown Action Group

The Markdown Action Group developed by Agile Tortoise is a tremendous resource for all kinds of markdown-related tasks.

I erroneously mentioned in the video that this action group comes with the Markdown Mail (w/ Mail Assistant) action. While I have this action stored in the Markdown action group, I added it later.

Date Formatting In Templates

While I am part of the IOS 8601 squad in my day-to-day experience, this email is an example of a time when that is not appropriate.

The Drafts documentation about templates has a section on formatting dates in case you also need to convert your dates into a specific format.

Things URL Builder

I have written before about some of the automation limitations of Things. However, the Things URL builder is a fantastic tool for digging into the app from afar.

Closure

I think a lot of emphasis gets placed on the time ROI of automating something. Most people argue that you should only automate something if it is going to save you time.

While I understand that logic, I think automations are great ways to deal with infrequent but stressful situations. Being able to automatically create and send absence notes for my son when is sick is a good use of an automation.

Let me know in the comments down below if this video/post inspired you to automate something!