Drafts and Dropbox Replace the Sticky Note

I recently spoke to the Local Government Law Committee of the Cincinnati Bar Association about my expanding use of the iPad in my local government law practice. One of the things I briefly mentioned, but didn’t have a chance to explore too deeply, was my increasing use of the app Drafts. It seems like every day I find a new use for this app that could apply just as easily to almost any practice area or profession.

For instance, I spend a fair amount of time on the telephone with clients. Sometimes they are asking a quick question, and other times they are giving me the details to get involved in a major project. Either way, I need a good way to track notes from those conversations. I used to keep a notepad by the phone, and if I remembered, I would tear out that sheet of paper and stick it in a client file (if a physical file had even been started). Too often those sticky notes or scraps of paper never made it to a file. And worse, even if they made it to the file, I wouldn’t have the physical file with me when I was away from my office.

Enter Drafts. Now every time I talk to a client I create a Drafts text file. With the magic of TextExpander Touch (more on this app some other day), a few keystrokes add a date and time stamp to every note. I can capture the details I need from that conversation right on my iPad. It also syncs to my iPhone, so I can see it there too. That’s great, but the last few days I have taken it one step further. Now enter Dropbox.

Drafts allows a user to send the text files directly to a number of locations (Mail, Messages, Byword, Evernote, etc.) But it also allows you to send it straight to Dropbox. And if that wasn’t good enough, you can create custom paths to send different text files to different Dropbox folders.

I took a few minutes to create four new Dropbox folders representing my four main local government clients. Now, every time I have a phone conversation with one of those clients, I can send those notes to a dedicated Dropbox folder. You can also set up Drafts to take a second action after you fire off the first. For example, once I send those text files to their appropriate Dropbox folder, Drafts automatically deletes the file from Drafts. So now I don’t have to worry about finding the note in Drafts – I only need to look in Dropbox. And now I can now view them on any of my devices or computers through my Dropbox account.

Pretty simple, but pretty cool. At least for me. It’s the little things, right?