Drafts as Hub: How AI Helped Me Connect Five Apps on iPad (Part 1)
I'm not a developer. I just have five apps that need to talk to each other and an AI that writes JavaScript.
I’m not a developer. I want to get that out of the way now because everything I’m about to describe sounds like something a developer built, and I don’t want anyone reading this to feel like they couldn’t do the same thing. I’m someone who writes at 6am and has an unhealthy obsession with making his iPad Pro do things Apple never intended. You’ve been warned.
This is the story of how I turned Drafts into the central nervous system of my entire productivity workflow, routing content to five different apps automatically, integrating AI for guided journaling, and building a cloud backend that lets my iPad talk to services it has no business talking to. I did almost all of it with AI helping me write the code.
How I Got Here
I’ve been using Drafts for years, but for a long time I used it the way most people do - as a quick capture tool. Open it up, type a thought, figure out what to do with it later. The problem was that “later” kept expanding. I’d capture something in Drafts, then manually copy it to Obsidian. Or open Notion and paste it there. Or create a task in Todoist by switching apps. Every piece of information I captured had a destination, but getting it there required me to be the delivery service.
That friction adds up. Not in dramatic ways, but in the slow erosion of actually doing the thing. I’d capture a thought at 2pm and tell myself I’d file it properly during my evening review. By 7pm I had fifteen drafts sitting in my inbox and zero motivation to sort them. So I didn’t. And the inbox grew. And the system I’d carefully built across Obsidian and Notion and Apple Notes started developing gaps because I wasn’t feeding it consistently.
The turning point, at least for me, was realizing that Drafts could run JavaScript. Not just simple text manipulation - actual HTTP requests, API calls, credential storage. Drafts could talk to Notion’s API directly. It could format content, parse markdown, and send structured data to Apple Shortcuts that would then push it into apps like Obsidian and Apple Notes that don’t have their own APIs. Once I understood that, the question stopped being “where should I put this?” and became “how do I make Drafts put it there for me?”
The Daily Flow
Here’s what a typical day looks like now, all orchestrated through Drafts with Todoist recurring tasks as the trigger layer:
6:15am - I open Drafts and run my Stoic Reflection action. It walks me through a guided morning reflection with structured prompts - CBT reframes, virtue focus, dichotomy of control exercises. The output gets saved to an Obsidian template. I'm not fully awake yet, and that's kind of the point - the prompts do the heavy lifting while I just respond honestly. I then use a Drafts template that let’s me write a quick journal entry (which I don’t always do every morning), and then I run an action that shares the journal entry to Obsidian and Apple Journal.
6:30am - Process Drafts Inbox. Everything I captured yesterday that I didn’t deal with gets triaged. One action sends things to Obsidian, another converts quick items into Todoist tasks. This takes maybe five minutes most days.
Throughout the day - Whenever I need to log something, I open Drafts, write it as a bullet point, and run my Daily Log action. One tap. That single action formats the content with a timestamp, sends it to today’s Daily page in Notion as individual bullet items, appends it to my Daily Log heading in Obsidian, and creates an entry in Apple Journal. Three destinations, one action, maybe two seconds of my time after I finish typing.
7:00pm - Daily Review. Another triage pass on anything that accumulated during the day.
7:30pm - Evening Stoic Reflection. Same action, but the evening version focuses on reviewing the day, what went well, what I'd do differently. Includes a sleep shutdown ritual.
Sundays at 6pm - Weekly Note. Here I run automation to review email, calendar, etc from the past week and also review upcoming meetings for the week to help me plan and prepare for the week ahead. I have a lot of sections in my weekly note that I often don’t fill out. I might end up simplifying it as I’ve learned in practice I don’t have the discipline to feel every single “weekly goal” “weekly meditation” etc.
First of each month at 6pm - Monthly Note. Same pattern as weekly note.
Todoist orchestrates all of this with recurring tasks that remind me when to run each action. Drafts does the actual work. I just show up and type.
Why Drafts and Not Something Else
I get asked this a lot, and the honest answer starts with admitting something that sounds insane: I use five different note-taking platforms on purpose.
Apple Notes is my mobile app. It’s fast, it syncs instantly, and when I’m out with my iPhone it’s the most natural place to check or jot something down. Obsidian is where my knowledge lives long-term, and on a desktop it’s the most versatile note-taking app I’ve ever used - nothing else comes close. But I don’t feel comfortable installing it on my work computer, so during the workday I use Notion since it runs in a browser and doesn’t require anything local. Apple Journal handles the personal reflection stuff. Todoist handles tasks.
I know this is crazy. I’m fully aware that most productivity advice says to pick one system and commit. But I like each of these tools for different reasons in different contexts, and what I actually wanted was to have all of them stay in sync so I could switch to whichever app made sense in the moment. My iPhone at the grocery store? Apple Notes. My iPad Pro at 5am? Obsidian through Drafts. Sitting at my work laptop between meetings? Notion in the browser.
To accomplish that insane dream, Drafts became the tool that links everything together.
Drafts opens instantly to a blank page. That’s it. That’s the entire argument for capture. When I have a thought at 2pm between meetings, I need zero friction between “I should write this down” and the words being on screen. Drafts wins that race every time. Everything else - the routing, the formatting, the API calls - happens after I’ve already captured the thought. The capture is sacred. The distribution is automation.
The other thing Drafts does that nothing else in my toolkit can match is act as a bridge. It runs JavaScript that can call any API. It runs Apple Shortcuts that can reach apps with no API. It stores credentials securely. It passes structured data between its own scripting engine and Shortcuts using template tags and a delimiter pattern I use constantly. Drafts isn’t the best app for any single thing in my workflow, but it’s the only app that can connect all of them. It turns five separate platforms into one system that I can access from whatever device I’m holding.
What AI Actually Built
I want to be honest about this part because I think it matters. I didn’t learn JavaScript to build these actions. I described what I wanted to Claude and it wrote the code, I tested it, found the bugs, described the bugs, and it fixed them. Repeat that cycle about fifty times and you have my entire workflow.
Some of the actions are genuinely complex. My Daily Notion Page action alone is about 225 lines of JavaScript with a full markdown-to-Notion-blocks parser that handles bold, italic, code, links, and strikethrough formatting. I didn’t write that parser. I couldn’t have written that parser. But I could describe exactly what it needed to do, test whether it did it, and articulate precisely what went wrong when it didn’t.
That’s the part I think people underestimate about using AI for this kind of work. You don’t need to know how to code. You need to know what you want, you need to be able to test it rigorously, and you need to describe failures clearly. Project management skills, in other words. The same skills I use at my day job turned out to be exactly what you need to direct AI through building something complex.
I also want to be clear that it wasn’t seamless. I had a duplication bug in my Daily Log action that took three rounds of debugging to fix - the entire draft was being sent to Notion as a single block instead of parsing out the individual bullet points. I had a meeting notes sync workflow that got so complex it broke Drafts entirely and had to be rebuilt as Python scripts running on my MacBook. Not everything worked on the first try. Not everything worked in Drafts at all.
But the stuff that did work? It changed how I use my iPad completely. I went from manually copying text between five apps to tapping a single button and having everything land where it belongs. And I built it without writing a single line of code myself.
Next in this series: Part 2 digs into the Daily, Weekly, and Monthly engine - how the actions actually work, the section picker UI pattern I reused everywhere, and the Notion API integration that required way more JavaScript than I expected.
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