Howard Abrams has a very nice post in which he talks about how he uses Org capture in his workflow. Most of us are familiar with Org capture and the use of templates to store data in some Org file. I use them all the time and they are a critical part of my workflow.
Abrams’ post is about how he sands down the friction points involved in the process to make capturing data as painless as possible. His main trick is to use the currently clocked task as the destination for his captures. One of the things that adds friction to the capturing process, he says, is the need to determine where the captured data should go. It turns out that you can make the currently clocked task the destination so that the data will automatically go to the Org file (and headline) you’re currently working with.
With that idea in mind he created a template to move the highlighted item to his target Org file. That’s pretty nice but there’s still the distraction of creating and seeing the Org capture buffer. He solves that by creating a couple of templates that just store the selected data without bothering with a capture buffer.
Next, he considers capturing code and the metadata (such as file name and location) that goes with it. This requires a bit of Elisp but is pretty simple and easy to understand.
Finally, he thinks about capturing data that is not in an Emacs buffer. He wrote a shell script that you can pipe data into and have it capture the data and store it in the currently clocked task. That’s very handy when you want to capture the data from some external task or pipeline. He also wrote some scripts (particular to macOS) to scrape data and its formatting from a browser page.
Abrams post has a lot of useful ideas and is worth taking a look at. You may find some or all of them useful in your own workflow