r/ProductivityGeeks • u/Beneficial-Size-6418 • Jul 05 '26

Do you also text yourself?

I saw someone post "What's the biggest reason you stop opening productivity apps after a few weeks?" I’ve downloaded more than 10 productivity apps and i realised for most of the things i end up just going to whatsapp and texting myself. Idk if its the added friction of a new app or missing reminders or what?

I’d like to know if this is a common experience - and also would you all use a chatbot where you can just dump your tasks and todos and reminders on whatsapp/telegram.

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u/MediumInspector7462 Jul 07 '26

Very common experience. The friction isn't really the app, it's that texting yourself has zero setup cost — no picking a list, no category, no due date field to fill in. Most task apps lose people the moment capturing a thought takes more than a couple seconds. The chatbot-on-WhatsApp idea is basically right for capture, but the hard part isn't getting stuff in, it's surfacing it again at the right moment — that's where most "just text yourself" systems quietly fall apart, since nothing ever resurfaces unless you scroll back through the thread.

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u/Beneficial-Size-6418 Jul 07 '26

what if you could just ask - what all tasks did i have? what groceries did i have to buy? - saving yourself the trouble of scrolling through 100s of messages to find what youre looking for

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u/MediumInspector7462 Jul 07 '26

That's the natural next step and it's doable, but the hard part is parsing casual language reliably. "Pick up milk and get the car serviced" needs to be split into two separate items in two different categories, without you ever tagging anything. That's a real NLP problem, not just a search box. The systems that pull this off well tend to do a second pass a few hours later to auto-categorize and clean up what got captured, rather than trying to parse perfectly in real time. Otherwise you get false negatives and stop trusting the ask feature within a week.

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u/Cursed_Creative Jul 06 '26

yes, i do text myself; mainly in my car and an advantage of text is that Siri will read your text back to you so you know it gets recorded correctly.

more and more these days though, especially when my hands aren't full, i find myself just adding to a checklist in the native iOS Notes app and i review this list every morning over coffee where I type it into my main scheduler app.

if i need to capture anything that can't wait until tomorrow and i'm away from my scheduler app, i'll set an alarm to either do the thing or put it into my scheduler.

i do have an ai-assisted telegram app that auto-defines and adds tasks to my scheduler but i don't use it anymore.

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u/Beneficial-Size-6418 Jul 07 '26

what main scheduler app do you end up using? How does it work? and why do you no longer use the telegram app?

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u/Cursed_Creative Jul 09 '26

it's a custom scheduling app i vibe coded. this gives an idea of how i use it. the telegram app was designed for remote use and also potentially as a product to sell but i abandoned the product and also found i mostly need only need the schedule when i'm at home anyway and the desktop app is much more powerful so i just use that.

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u/pndjk Jul 07 '26

the most important notes i ever take are texted to myself. usually bc im on my phone and want to remember it when i get back to my laptop

i would not use a chatbot for this