I mentioned in my previous post that I would have preferred one tool to handle my knowledge base. After hearing about Drafts on the Focused podcast (Episode 104), I thought I would give that a try. I installed it on all my devices and started the 7 day free trial.

My first impression was kind of meh. The text editing part was awesome, and the ability to choose multiple markdown flavors was really nice, but the way that it stored information was really not what I was hoping for. It is not to say that it is bad, just not what I wanted for knowledge based articles. After the first couple of hours, I was pretty sure that I wasn’t going to keep the subscription. Then I started playing with the actions.

Actions is one of the things that sets Drafts apart from other tools. Actions allow you to do something with the text. In my case, it started with sending tasks to OmniFocus. Getting larger projects and lists into OmniFocus has always been a issue for me. I even bought OmniOutliner to be able to use that to create my projects, but even that didn’t include all of the fields I want to include in a task. When I found an action that would send entries into OmniFocus, I started to think I might get the subscription just for this feature. I also found some other actions that were interesting, including one for creating multiple entries in Fantastical.

What really hooked my on Drafts was writing my own actions. My first action was just a simple thing, but it really drove home the power of the Drafts. I started with the OmniFocus task action and modified it to post things directly to my grocery list in OmniFocus. I also learned about creating templates, so that I could have pre-defined documents. I was sold on Drafts as a tool that belongs in my toolbox, but I still wasn’t sold on it being the place to store my knowledge. I started looking at how it integrated with some of the other tools I used for knowledge management such as Bear and Notion. The Bear integration was pretty good, but the Notion one not so much.

I started to think that I might just save it to folders and use something like Obsidian or even just a markdown viewer like Marked2. While I was researching those possibilities, I came across another tool that was the final piece of the puzzle for me: DEVONThink. My process is now to write everything out in Drafts, and then use an action to send it over DEVONThink for storage and future reference.

Next week, I’ll share why DEVONThink was the final piece of the puzzle.