I use a couple headings to separate out the title of the video, the description, my research notes, and my script. The Insert Text action is pretty simple, and all you need to do is type out the template you want. Hit the “plus” icon to add a step, and while there are tons of options here, we’re just going to use one of them, Insert Text. Now let’s actually tell this action what to do, so let’s go to the top of the action configuration page and go into steps.
Enable a keyboard shortcut to activate this action quickly from an iPad or Mac (I like Cmd+Opt+Ctrl and a letter to do this, but Drafts lets you set up basically anything you want.I like this since it can help me filter down to seeing only these documents in Drafts. Scroll down to the “after success” section and add a tag to assign to the draft when you run this action.Change the color of the icon (again, for fun and distinctivness).Make it something fun, but recognizable at a glance. Tap the icon next to the name to change the icon for that action.I’ll leave most of the fiddly settings to you, but there are a few things you likely want to configure. Now tap the “plus” icon to create a new action (or right click in the list and select Insert Action on the Mac), and now we’re off to the races with tons of possibilities in front of us. The easiest way to do this is to swipe to the left on your iPhone or iPad, or by clicking this button in the top right of the Mac app. The first thing you need to do is to pull up your “actions” panel on the right side of the screen.
It is worth noting here that creating your own actions requires a Drafts Pro subscription, which is $29.99/year or $2.99/month. These include research notes, a script, what I am going to have in the video description, and some general metadata around dates, URLs, and video titles. I’m going to show you how I set up a template for my YouTube videos. Drafts will even sync these themes over iCloud, so you can have them on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac.Ĭreating Your Document Template with Drafts ActionsĬreating a template is easy in Drafts, you just have to know what you want. Just choose one, tap install, and it will load it into Drafts on your device. This is a rabbit hole all on its own, as you can also create your own themes for Drafts, but the Drafts Directory has a bunch of nice themes you can use.
Head back to the Drafts Directory to look at some of the themes you can download to make Drafts look how you want. Next, we need to make Drafts look a little more to our taste. Drafts saves everything as plain text while you’re using the app, but it can export fully-styled text, and these Markdown actions will make sure you get all the formatting options you need when exporting your drafts. This will make some of the most common keyboard shortcuts like CMD+B (bold) and CMD+I (italic) work as you’d expect in the app.
I’ve been able to make this work well for me, and even if you’re not working on YouTube, you could also use this process to make Drafts a nice writing app for publishing to Micro.blog, Ulysses, Day One, and more.ĭrafts is solid right out of the box - if a little plain - so first off we need to do two things to make it a better writing app.įirst, let’s install the Markdown action group from the Drafts Directory.
This involves a document with specific formatting, tags to sort things in my Drafts library, and a few more small details. Today we’re going to look at how I’ve set up Drafts to be where all my writing happens for YouTube videos. However, you may need some help getting it there. It’s a blank canvas, which means you can turn it into whatever you want.
It is so powerful and the productive people you follow online always seem to be using it, so it must be great, right? Drafts is great, but it is also a bit intimidating to people the first time they open it. It’s all about the little things, and what feels right for each person.ĭrafts is one of those apps that people see and want to use. The basic concept of letting users type text into an app is not special, and yet writing apps are one of those things that everyone is very particular about.
You can technically write an entire novel inside of Apple Notes or compose your blog posts in Notepad on your Windows computer.