1w ago

Does anyone else use this way of taking notes?

My go to way of taking notes is sending messages to myself. Previously with Signal's "Note to self" and now with my own channel with Element. It is fast way of taking notes, but horrible in long run since you cannot group notes or add tags or anything else that you would expect from good note taking tool. I have Nextcloud notes, but I still do it since I am used to it and it is fast way of syncing notes with mobile and PC. Anyone else has interesting ways of keeping notes?

57 comments

My wife does this, except she sends the messages to me
- Yeah my husband does this to me too. One time he was camping and texted me just a person's name with no other context. Like are you about to be murdered and this is the main suspect??
- Her second, extra, brain? Makes sense to me. Also it's written down in a place they will probably be ~~ing~~ seeing an above average amount of the time.
- I do this to my gf, the world is truly balanced
- This is how my wife operates too.

I'm all about Signal's Note to Self.
- Came here to post that. Such a damn convenient way to send notes and links between my phone and desktop.
  
  Fantastic for that purpose.
  
  If you are interested try Localsend, its even less effort than sharing via a messenger and its peer to peer. You can enable auto downloads for trusted peers then it will be sent directly to a folder of your choice once you send from your phone.
- I hate that it doesn't send a notification though. I used the delay send feature on Textra for reminders but since switching to Signal it's useless for that. I just want to send myself a message delayed by a few hours and get a notification when it sends. Only thing missing is the notification.

Better yet: Send messages to random people in your contact list who have no clue what you‘re talking about. That way you can even categorize your notes by importance.

Yeah lol. I'll send myself SMS texts like 10 times a day

I too use Signal's Note to Self like this, and I save links by sharing them with Standard Notes. That's about 90% of all my notes right there.
- I believe all messaging apps need a note to self option, make it be possible to enable from settings. I keep wanting to tell people to use note to self instead of randomly sending me stuff, but then I remember it's a signal only thing.

Had a manager who used to send notes intended for himself to our team chat. Psychotic behaviour.
Every phone has a note app. No matter how stupid you are, it works. But if messages to yourself floats your boat: why not.
- It's helpful for me. It's just a raw stream of thoughts and ideas. Most don't go anywhere but it's a good first stop to get an idea out of my head. Even if it turns out to be stupid I can read it later and react accordingly.

Someone needs to get the bright idea of an app that is a notes app designed to function like a messaging app.
You can “message yourself” immediately or set a time delay so that the message comes in after a given amount of time, or at a certain time, or under certain conditions. You can tell messages to repeat until you finally address the contents.
An extra-sinister idea would be an option to set messages to come in like a phone call. Make a message titled BOSS that repeated every morning. That’ll get you up.
- You can delay messages to yourself with Signal if you long-press the send button. I also run my own email server, and schedule messages in the future to remind me about things.
  
  It doesn't send a notification though unfortunately.
- There's a program called Mine on the Google Play store that's a note taking application designed to look like a social media app (like Twitter/Mastodon).
  
  Looks cool. Somehow it's not compatible with my device. Galaxy S22.
- My phone can schedule send text messages. What's better is if I use a number that isn't a number I will get a text back saying it is an invalid recipient.

unsent emails kept in the gmail drafts folder allows syncing notes across devices, and its searchable

heh
My Matrix-channel for this purpose is called "scratchpad" - and I use it for short-lived information I need to be able to access from all devices. Notes that are supposed to live longer and/or be shared with others go into Nextcloud.
We are the same.

I was using the Signal "notes to self" too when taking notes during talks and conferences. Taking quick pictures of the slides in context was also a key thing for me. Exporting these unstructured notes into a useful notes archive is a pain as you say, especially if there is media too.
I caught myself doing this so often that I ended up building myself an app for this specific workflow. It's rather simple, just an MVP if you will, but it works well for me. Taking notes works exactly like Signal's "note to self" but it has some QoL stuff on top of that like separate notebooks and exporting notes and pictures to a single PDF archive. I can then import the PDF archive into Notion, which is my main notes repository. Notion can now parse PDF files and import them as regular Notion pages, which closes the loop for me rather nicely. YMMV ofc
I haven't published it to any app stores yet (might do in the future) but the source code is available here if you're technically savvy and happy to build and install it yourself.

More people need to check out Notesnook. It’s FOSS, cross-platform, powerful, and has a sync server that can be self-hosted.
- No thanks. I'll just keep emailing myself.
  
  Like a boss.
- I am so in love with Notesnook. It's been about a week and I fell hard. Great UI. Encrypted. Cross platform. Loads quickly. I wish markdown was native and not a shortcut though.
- I've been using JTx board myself, but still have some things going into goggles notes which I can't put my finger on why
  This is worth a look - thanks!

I use Syncthing to sync plain text notes between my PC and phone. I have a private syncthing relay running on my NAS so it'll only sync when I'm connected to my home network. AFAIK, even if you've got global discovery on and are using the public relay network, your data is encrypted in transport.

Wtf. So many people doing this. Thought I was the only one. It all started when I decided to start relying less on Google.

I do. Also messages for the feds.

Like OP used to I use Signal Note to Self. It's handy moving stuff from mobile to desktop and the reverse as well.
Joplin for long term stuff. Both are backed up to my NAS / password protected 7z archives to Cloud automated by said NAS.

Fuck yeah, my text app has a built in "Keep" contact. That bitch is loaded with messages.

Signal is great for this. Ive written whole chapters this way.

I open new browser tabs and type into a pastebin.
Pastery going login-only majorly screwed me over; now I use GitHub gists.

How you mentioned it’s a horrible idea in the long run is exactly why I don’t do this for anything other than trying to send a link.

For quick notes I use unsaved Notepad++ whenever on Windows, and random text files on desktop on Linux made with KWrite.
For more organized notes I use self-hosted MediaWiki instance.

Nope, I have been using Notesnook for nearly three years for notes.

My dumb ass never knew signal had notes to self
- Same. Might as well start doing this since no one is sending me secrets launch codes. I feel so alone 😔
  
  👊🇺🇸🔥

I recently did a project.
Self-hosted Ntfy as communication, python bot in a container. If you say remember something It drops it into a text file verbatim. If you say remind me, It loads the text file into an ollama AI RAG and queries it with whatever you asked it to remind you. At the moment it can take a good 5 seconds to get back to you.
Then I added a grocery list and a separate bot that handles scheduling reminders. Remind me in 20 minutes to feed the dog. Forget this item. Remind me on the 20th of every April that it's fu's birthday.
At the moment, it's based on keywords and if you don't specify a keyword it just asks the model directly. I'm thinking about having it send all requests through the model and giving the model a prompt that has a determines what you're trying to do and translates that to a keyword that the bot can act on.

Ohh, I definitely prefer to send myself a text, especially since I can schedule it to send when I need a reminder at a specific time for something.

I make group chats with only me as a member to organize by subject.
Note to self got too cluttered, but it continues as my junk drawer for notes.
Note taking apps are a separate stop so i will never use them for quick or temporary work. They're for long term stuff like recipes and fitness tracking.

I use Simplenote for all my notes, tags, markup, syncs between all my devices. I really enjoy it!

I email my work account because I don't check work emails when I'm not at work. I once considered creating an automation system for emailing my personal address and having those emails get added to a to-do list, but didn't ever pull the trigger.
I sms myself information when it's going to be relevant shortly after, but otherwise my notes live in Simplenote and have for years. It syncs across my devices.

I think my way is far worse: I write in an unsynced plain text note app on my phone, and then when I need it on my computer, Share > KDE Connect > copy & paste into a text editor.
(I gave Joplin a quick try but didn't like the non-WYSIWYG-ness on the phone.)

Note taking app isn’t accessible on every device like email so I get it

yea i use discord for getting stuff from my phone to my PC. I keep all my notes in obisidan but I could never get it to sync right and it has since stopped working on my phone altogether.

Previously I used pushbullet but now signal note to self

I use Google keep for stuff like that. Available everywhere I have a connection.

Having a number of phone numbers in my private PBX available, I set one as an "audio note" system. I can call that number, there is no prompt but the beep, I can leave a message, and get it in my mail as an mp3.

i use Google Keep, pretty handy so I can pate the notes while on my phone, then edit via the PC's browser.

i send messages to myself when i need to get a link/image from my phone to my pc or vice versa

I send it to my friend!

57 comments