Using Drafts and TextExpander to Organize Lesson Notes

I am moving more of my text notes to Drafts these days. You can read about how I use Drafts here. Drafts is a note-taking app where most of my text typing starts. When I am ready to act upon my text, the actions on the right side of the screen allow me to send it off to messages, emails, tasks, notes, social media, and more.

Generally, I use Drafts as a text-inbox, where I eventually process all of my text ideas and send them to other apps that are better suited for them. But lately, I wonder why I need to take the extra step of sending a draft to another app when Drafts is perfectly suited for organizing and searching text.

Let's take Lesson Notes, for example. When I teach a sectional, large ensemble, or private lesson, I like to take notes on what we played and what I assigned. Usually, I would type these in Drafts and then send the finished text to Apple Notes. But lately, I am just keeping it in Drafts and archiving it so that it doesn't clutter up the inbox area. Everything is in plaintext so searching my entire 7,000 draft library is way faster than searching Apple Notes. Plus, it reduces the amount of time I ever even need to open Apple Notes by 90 percent.

I add the tag "sectionals" to a draft where I have taken sectional notes, and I have a custom workspace that allows me to see just the drafts with that tag.

Additionally, tagging them "badge" makes it so that the draft doesn't contribute to the number on the red badge of the Drafts icon. I use the badge only to inform me of drafts that need to be processed to another app.

I write most of my drafts in Markdown, which means I use "#" symbols to note levels of the heading, "**" to indicate things I want bold, etc... If you want to read more about how I use Markdown, read this post. Drafts and common web editing tools like WordPress (and even Canvas) can turn this Markdown into HTML. I only use Markdown for my sectional notes to show bullet-pointed lists and first/second-level headings. Drafts does some light formatting to help me better see this information by, for example, highlighting the headings green.

It gets tedious to retype this template for every class, so I have TextExpander snippets to do it for me. Read about how I am using TextExpander here.

In the case of the snippet below, I type "sectionalnotes" into the body of the draft and then TextExpander prompts me for the ensemble and sectional name and then automatically fills in that data, with my fill-ins and the current date.

Using an action called Current UUID, I can copy a link to a draft to my clipboard and paste it in to the calendar event for whatever class, lesson, or sectional it is related to. That way, I can easily refer to it by date, using the visually friendly interface of a calendar app.

New Software Updates from Apple: Exploring Widgets!

iOS 14, iPadOS 14, watchOS 7, and tvOS 14 came out a few weeks ago. I have a lot to say about these updates, but today I wanted to write about widgets for a moment.

Widgets are catching on as a significant feature amongst the masses. As someone who plays around with the way apps are organized on the home screen at least twice a week, I can tell that widgets are going to add a lot of excitement (and anxiety) into my life. I have been toying with them since July when this software entered the public beta, and I am far from resolved.

Here is where I have landed for now…

Page one (middle image) contains my most tapped app icons. This will be a hard habit to break, but I find lots of value in having upcoming calendar tasks and weather permanently on my most visited screen. Weather Line and Fantastical have the best small-sized widgets, in my opinion. Even this smallest widget size takes up four app icons, so they need to be beautiful and information-dense for it to be worth me sacrificing four apps.

I didn’t think I would want weather on this first screen, but now that it is always visible to me, I don’t see how I could live without it. The Weather Line widget is awesome because its user interface depicts the weather on a line, almost like a chart. It even manages to fit an hourly rain graph into its small space when it is raining out. Not even my second favorite weather widget, Carrot Weather, does that.

The Today View (left image) is where I keep Siri Shortcuts and the older, legacy style widgets from iOS 13. As much as I like the newer widgets’ look, the older style widgets are interactive. I keep OmniFocus, Timery (for time tracking), Streaks (for tracking daily habits), and Waterminder (for quickly logging water) all on this screen because I can tap right on the buttons to act on these apps without the widget needing to launch into the app.

I am continually playing with page 2 (right picture). I like it to be mostly another grid of tappable apps, but I am experimenting with various widgets here. I think what I have settled on is to have the Maps and Notes app widgets stacked on top of each other at the top, and then to use the Siri Suggestion widget, which shows me two rows of apps that swap in and out throughout the day based on my phone’s predictions of which apps I want to use in which contexts. The image above shows some other widgets I am experimenting with, but I think I prefer having more app icons there.

On the iPad, I keep: calendar, weather, notes, Apollo (a Reddit app I use to keep up on the latest news about my interests), Siri Shortcuts, and the Files app for launching into recently modified files. 

On both my phone and iPad, I am waiting for an OmniFocus widget to track my tasks. Even though I like the one in the Today view where you can mark the tasks as done right from the widget, I think I might want to have my next few upcoming tasks permanently visible on page one.

9to5Mac.com and MacStories.net have been two great websites to follow if you want to stay up on which apps offer widgets.

🔀 My digital workflows featured in Teaching Music magazine this month

There is a new Teaching Music magazine out. Here is the cover:

Even more fun is what's on the inside! There is a two page article on using technology to be better organized. It features some of my Todoist, Notability, and Dropbox workflows. Also featured is the amazing Amy Burns, who explains how she is using the apps iDoceo and Seesaw in the elementary general music classroom.

It is totally worth checking out. Also, Digital Organization Tips for Music Teachers is featured in the recommended resources section of the magazine, along with the next book in the Prestissimo Series, Recording Tips for Music Educators, by Ron Kearns.

Check out some pictures below...

Announcing My First Book ---> Digital Organization Tips for Music Teachers!

I am excited to announce that I am writing a book!

Actually, I already wrote it. Oxford University Press will publish the book, "Digital Organization Tips for Music Teachers," this Fall. It will be the first title in the series, "Essential Music Technology: The Prestissimo Series" with series editor, Richard McCready.

The book will focus on how technology can help rather than stifle productivity in the music teaching profession. It will address such topics as: minimizing paper, managing tasks, taking good notes, organizing iTunes playlists, understanding music streaming services, working in the cloud, and managing scores. The book will provide an overview of the apps and services I have found most useful in my teaching experience. It will include sample workflows for using these technologies in music teaching contexts.

Stay tuned to this site for more information. The blog has been quiet this year as I have spent more time writing the book. Upon release, I plan to write posts of a supplementary nature. I also plan to do a miniseries on my podcast that offers commentary on the book. I will be inviting many insightful guests on the show to discuss a different chapter each episode.

I also have a really fun video trailer in the works featuring some brilliant acting talent from my colleagues in the Howard County Public School System and some awesome editing work from the guys over at Four/Ten Media.

I hope you will pick up a copy when it is released.