Readwise > Drafts > Obsidian

Cool Workflows
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I’ve very much brought into Drafts being where text starts for me. I use it for quick random notes and pretty much all of my writing and then just push the output to wherever it is needed.

Part of that writing consists of notes and thoughts on books that I’ve read. I’ve built out a custom template which I can populate as I read the book and then push the final version into Obsidian.

Now the problem comes because I also like the Readwise service. I find it an easy way to make highlights as I read through the book. Those highlights serve to be good “note making” fodder within Obsidian, so I’d like to include them in the final version of my book notes in Drafts.

My question is, what’s the best way of getting them in there? I don’t see an easy way of opening MD files in Drafts and, to be honest, I get that that goes against the grain of what Drafts is trying to achieve - it’s not meant to be a MD editor.

I understand that there’s the option to push the highlights from Readwise directly into Obsidian, but to be honest that’s a last resort. I like having all content in Obsidian as my ‘finalised’ content and Drafts for … well, the unfinished Drafts of my work.

The other option seems to be to download a dedicated MD editor, but both options would be pretty frustrating for me as it would go against the writing workflow that I currently have in place.

So any thoughts from the community here? Am I just making this more complicated than it needs to be?

Thanks a lot for your help!

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Drafts works quite well as a Markdown editor and processor. I use it as a place to start my own notes, and have customized MultiMarkdown to make it even more effective for me.

What I would recommend: import your highlights from Readwise into Drafts (one action). Do whatever you want to do with them in Drafts to get them into shape for Obsidian (manually, or with other actions), then export them into .md files in you Obsidian vault.

I don’t know if Readwise has a user-facing API. If it does, an action could easily pull in your highlights. Otherwise, you can presumably export from Readwise into some sort of markdown or text file (in a temporary directory if you like) that you then import into Drafts.

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Thanks very much for the response @tf2 - much appreciated!

Possibly a silly question, but I’m assuming that when you talking importing the files into Drafts, you mean that that would need to be done manually i.e. double clicking on the MD file within the directory as opposed to being able to push them in directly.

While Readwise does have an API, I think I’d have to do some research on how to build an Action around it so, for the time being, I would need to manually download the MD files into a directory (as you said).

Thanks again for the help