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.

Previously I used pushbullet but now signal note to self

I do. Also messages for the feds.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

My wife does this, except she sends the messages to me

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’m all about Signal’s Note to Self.

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.

More people need to check out Notesnook. It’s FOSS, cross-platform, powerful, and has a sync server that can be self-hosted.

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.

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.