I have used Drafts over several years and still finding new ways to speed up some repetetive tasks in my day-to-day workflow. In the past, I had in mind to write an extensive review about Drafts from VoiceOver user perspective, but Greg rolls out new updates and features faster than I catch up with innovations from the previous updates. I still have stored both my outline from last year and a few thousand words, so maybe I will reconsider and publish the review someday. Meanwhile, below, I will share a simple workflow which I will benefit from on a weekly basis.

It happens that I need to call a phone number which either comes through email or I found the number on a support page. Usually, I will do it later in a day, and therefore I capture the phone number in Drafts for later use. I prefer to make my calls from iPhone. Before I created the call shortcut, I needed to copy the number out of Drafts, open phone application, navigate to the fourth tab named «Keyboard», paste the number and press call. It may sound as not a big issue, but if you have to do it frequently, it starts tu add-on. Moreover, this steps takes extra time to perform as VoiceOver user.

I created a simple shortcut which gets the content of a draft, sends it to the shortcut and calls the number which was stored in the draft. Combining with Drafts actions, all I need to do is open the draft on my phone (which I used to do previously anyway), swipe a few times to the right and run the call action. The shortcut is very basic because it grabs the entire content of a draft. I could make a few adjustments to detect a phone number in a draft and extract it apart from the rest of the draft. Since I save the phone numbers as individual drafts anyway, I didn’t have a need to make this shortcut more powerful than my use case is.

No advanced scripts this time, but it feels good to spend a few minutes to create this utility and knowing that you will save both some time and frustration by using this action.