photo: Dimitri Karastelev
By: Nick Gambino
Sending messages or emails to yourself has long been a life hack that helps people stay more organized. You can drop reminders, ideas or even shopping lists to read later. Personally, this is something I rarely use as the Notes app in my phone is good enough for me. It’s a little unwieldy what with my 2,000 notes but good enough to help me remember things. Still, I can see the appeal of messaging yourself to read later.
WhatsApp is adding a feature that allows you to quickly message yourself. The feature aptly titled “Message Yourself” places your name at the top of the contact list when you construct a new message.
To be clear, you’ve always been able to message yourself on WhatsApp, but it’s been a bit of a nightmare. Even if you have your name and number in your contact list it doesn’t come up when you’re creating a message and searching your contacts. As a workaround, you’d have to use the click to chat URL.
Another workaround is creating a group chat with just you in it and messaging through that. If you’re trying to message yourself routinely, this just won’t cut it. Now it’s an integrated feature that is simpler to use. Just like a message from another contact, you’ll get a notification that you have a message waiting. I suggest leaving it unread until you’re ready to deal with it.
If you plan on using this feature regularly, I also suggest pinning your thread with yourself to the top of your chat. That’ll make it super easy to access the next time you have an idea searing through your mind or have to remember to pick up eggs at the grocery store.
WhatsApp is not the first messaging app to come up with this idea. Signal already has a “Note to Self” feature (a far superior name).
If you don’t see the Message Yourself feature in WhatsApp yet, be patient. It’s rolling out globally over the next couple weeks on both iOS and Android. I haven’t seen it yet myself, but Meta confirmed to TechCrunch that it’s coming to everybody.
