Workaround version of 'quick add to inbox' from anywhere in Dynalist

🌈Share & Showcase
#1

I am sure this will have occurred to a lot of people, but if you are someone who, when you are working on something in dynalist and want to make a note / thought in your general inbox you actually GO to your inbox to type it, this is for you:

Step 1. Wherever you are, even if you are in the middle of writing a beautiful novel in Dynalist, press enter and type your thought / note / whatever into a new bullet … this is ludicrously banal of course but I have found this temporary ‘tarnishing’ of the thing you are working on acts as a psychological barrier to thinking of this as an option.

Step 2. execute the following macro (phrase express code) [Coded to Ctrl + Shift + i for me]
{#CTRL {#SHIFT -chars m}}@Inbox{#ENTER}

This of course just opens the ‘move to’ dialogue, enters your (unique) name for your inbox and sends it there.

As I say, this will not be big news for many, but personally despite being a macro fiend it took me a while to think of this, I think because of the ‘tarnishing’ barrier I mentioned at the start …

Enjoy!

6 Likes
#2

do you keep 1 inbox or multiple inboxes?

I find it banal as well to have to swap bulletpoints

I set my move position to “start of destination item”

I currently find I have several places I inbox things

  1. SOP (standard operating procedures - HOW to guides), WIKI → These are unsorted reference notes
  2. Someday tasks → these are things not urgent or important, its more of a “suggestion” of ideas to assign the next week’s tasks. These are sorted, by the latest ones at the top of the list
  3. Also quotes / philosophies → unsorted ones here.

What I find is that I have an inbox for those 3 things generally

The problem I have right now with my system, is the following:

  1. Do I duplicate notes with this macro (that you suggested)
  2. Or cutpaste

For tasks and philosophies… I will just cutpaste macro. Since they can be summarized into one independent bulletpoint most of the time

but for notes I generate inside of my DAILY NOTES, sometimes I want to put it into reference notes. I rewrite things manually and summarize it afterwards, which is kind of time consuming and redundant, but easier to reference overall

Sometimes I’ll just run with an idea in daily notes (since I didn’t know where to put said listing of notes), format it very well, then realize I want that information in my SOP/Wiki as well, so I’m always debating whether I want to just duplicate it instead of cutting+paste it

The reason I sometimes duplicate my notes is that in my SOP / WIKI is that I can search things via well-structured bulletpoints, everything in DAILY notes is searched via @tag or by searching the whole day

With regards to your tarnishing barrier, I feel the exact opposite. I plopped an idea into DAILY NOTES, I don’t want to tarnish (Aka remove) my daily notes by moving those notes away into my SOP/WIKI notes. It feels like I stripped away my stream of thought process when there’s a gap of notes missing from there.

#3

Excellent tip.
I use Phrase Express a lot and I have implemented this shortcut

Thanks.:slight_smile:

1 Like
#4

I ended up modifying my macros so I can have a narrowed range of pre-existing inboxes that I move items too

What I do is basically stephen’s suggestion and add extra macros binded to the same key

Example:

iSfnQy5.png1516×736 94.2 KB

When you run the shortcut macro, you just ↓ ↑ pick which inbox you want and press enter

GVVIea1.gif1584×246 52.2 KB

it has some serious input lag to it though for some reason, which I will have to refine later though.

I do this when moving my daily sprint notes around if needed

1 Like
#5

You can try to put these three inputs in one folder and assign the shortkey to the folder instead of each input . I do not have lag

1 Like
#6

Mmm yes this is a nice way of dealing with multiple inboxes indeed!

#7

Good to know, I’ll definitely start using shortcut key folders more often