I am always looking at automation where I can so I can continue to achieve more, get more done and generally not feel so overwhelmed.
By using tagging in Drafts and the actions, I can easily automate some tasks and have them automatically processed so I don't need to manually do the work. What has made this possible is the truly awesome application Drafts, is actions with callback-urls and the integration with other applications.
I now use Drafts and Shortcuts on iOS to automate all my new entries I need to add to the calender.
So during the day, if a new meeting request comes in, or an appointment I need to add to the calendar, I open drafts and type some thing like
Catch up with the boss December 11 1pm for one hour
Add the tag to the draft which I have as calendar. Then at 10pm each day, my iOS shortcut springs into life and scans all Drafts that have the tag calendar and run the Drafts action that is setup. Now in drafts there is already a default action called “Event in Fantastical”, this is under the Basic Menu. I have copied this as you need to make a small addition, without this change it will open Fantastical but then stay there in the app as this is expecting input. Changing the string will allow this to automatically add the entry and continue to loop through.
The small change is below, you need to put the add=1, I have copied the whole string below. I named the action “Event to fantastical auto”
fantastical2://x-callback-url/parse/?sentence=[[draft]]&add=1
Once you have this setup, you just need the iOS shortcut to Open drafts and run the action against all drafts that have the correct tag, I have included a screen shot of the Shortcut.
Fantastical has many different options if you would like to modify the xcallback url any more, you can see them all by using the following link.
