Texting yourself for capturing ideas

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.

Writing Is Thinking

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.

I text myself all day every day — and you should, too – The Verge

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.

This is a very important note about something.

====== ← This is my “processed” bookmark. Anything above this line is processed and I don’t need to see it again.

My Notebook System (part 3): Field Notes Pocket Notebook – Decoding

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.

Related to the previous issue , I could use UI scripting and Hookmark to get the currently selected notes’ URL.

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.

TaskPaper as an interstitial journal