Inspired by Federico Viticci’s Open Tabs Editorial workflow, I created this little workflow to quickly capture and act on story ideas for blog posts or other text documents.

It all starts in Drafts, which I can fire up wherever I go from my iPhone. I enter an idea, or a short title or a link with a comment. This then gets appended to a Markdown file on Dropbox called Story Ideas.md. Conveniently, this file lives in my Editorial folder in Dropbox and show right up on my iPad.

So this:

Write about this cool workflow

Becomes this in my Story Ideas.md:

2013-12-06 - Write about this cool workflow

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In Editorial, I have a workflow called Manage Story Ideas that allows me to extract an idea from the whole document into a new document ready for editing. Alternatively, I can also delete the idea if I decide it’s not worth pursuing after all.

I wanted the workflow to open up the newly created document ready for editing. Sadly, Editorial currently has a bug that doesn’t all that, so that little extra convenience has to wait until the next Editorial update.

You can get the Drafts action by clicking here and the Editorial workflow is available on the Workflow Sharing site.