• ▾ A couple of months ago I started to use Messages for talking to myself.
  • ▾ Why do I want to do that?
    • ▾ When I want to figure something out, I noticed that the best way to do it is to start writing in freeform text.
    • ▾ It feels like talking to myself, which helps me to externalize my ideas, and find solutions quickly to problems. It’s like a pre-thinking phase for capturing ideas in a timeline format, then organizing them later in a mindmap or an outline.
    • ▾ Slack has a similar idea of why you should start to message yourself. When you open your profile and press the Direct Message button, the following message appears on the top.
      • ▾ This is your space. Draft messages, list your to-dos, or keep links and files handy. You can also talk to yourself here, but please bear in mind you’ll have to supply both sides of the conversation.
    • ▾ Others also wrote about this idea in more detail. It is the modern version of emailing ourselves.
    • ▾ Messages is actually a pretty cool candidate for this workflow. It is available on all my devices, I can pin messages for reviewing them later, and it is still the best way to share information between my devices when AirDrop and Handoff farts themselves.
  • ▾ How to set it up?
    • ▾ Texting with ourselves in Messages is a bit weird since every message will be sent back in the same thread duplicating everything. We can avoid that by registering a new iCloud account and sending messages to there.
    • ▾ I have a sparse iCloud sandbox account which I use for testing. I logged in from my old MacBook Air, then I started to write thoughts for myself over iMessage.
      • ▾ We have to log into a separate iCloud account at least once, otherwise, Messages won’t pick up the account as a proper recipient.
  • ▾ This is yet another version of the capture step in GTD
    • ▾ This idea was cool, but for me it quickly fell apart. People get the idea of writing stuff down, but they forget that it needs to be processed later.
    • ▾ When I had to pull out data from Messages, it was hard to mark my processed position in the timeline.
    • ▾ I started to use a marker message by typing 5 equal signs which is similar to how I mark my processed position in my notebook using a double line.
    • ▾ When I process, I usually reference information between apps, which means that I like to link to the source or at least copy the text out into a place that I can link to.
      • ▾ There is a hidden URL scheme in Messages, but it is really hard to link to messages.
        • ▾ sms://open?message-guid=UUID
        • ▾ If there is a data detector visible in your message (like the text of “tomorrow 9:00am”), Messages will underline it, and you can create a new event or a reminder by clicking on it. Creating a new reminder will also add the link to the message which you can copy.
    • ▾ Getting links or text out of Messages is actually bit convoluted.
  • ▾ Strflow, an actual app made for texting yourself
    • ▾ I just found a unique new app today called Strflow, which mixes note-taking with a messaging interface. It works exactly like I wanted to use Messages.
    • ▾ Why it is better than Messages?
      • ▾ There is a “Copy Note Link” command for every note.
      • ▾ Notes can be edited after they are created.
      • ▾ There is a minimal Markdown-like syntax available, which lets me have the right amount of formatting for quick notes like these.
    • ▾ I love unique apps like this one – that’s one the reasons I love the Mac, since you can always find interesting tools like this – although it still has some missing pieces.
      • ▾ iOS version (the developer mentioned that he’s working on it).
      • ▾ Spotlight integration: it just feels right to index and search snippets of information in Spotlight.
      • ▾ Better export: we get a JSON file on export, but since the app uses Markdown for formatting, why not export proper Markdown notes?
        • ▾ It would be even better if I could define a date range for exporting, so processing information can be done outside of Strflow.
      • ▾ Although there are unique links for each note, getting them is a bit hard. I have to ⌃Click and choose the “Copy Link to Note” command from the context menu which is not available in the app’s menubar.
        • ▾ strflow://show-note?id=UUID
      • ▾ Selecting notes can be done using the trackpad, but having keyboard shortcuts for navigating up and down would be useful to select one or multiple notes.
  • ▾ So what am I using Strflow for?
    • ▾ As I mentioned, I mostly use this app for talking with myself to figure out something by writing.
      • ▾ I started the draft of this post there.
      • ▾ I saved couple of links which I want to revisit later.
      • ▾ It is like a private version of Mastodon.
    • ▾ It is going to be another inbox/journal/status update tool next to my interstitial journal in TaskPaper.