Many messengers have a feature where you can send notes to self or forward interesting messages for later reading.
However, with time, such chats turn into a steaming pile of crap.
My 'Saved Messages' chat is a digital graveyard—1,287 unread links, half-baked ideas, and forgotten notes.
This is a handy feature, yet it has downsides.
Pros
- Useful for jotting stuff down fast: messenger apps are often already open for day to day communication
- Messages and posts can be forwarded there in a couple of clicks
- Cross-platform
Cons
- It's a chat, not a notebook
- Impossible to find anything
- No friction: too easy to dump, too hard to clean
- Addictive dumping: bad habit that's hard to give up ("I'll sort it later" = never)
- Loss: Posts and links get buried in the huge heap of stuff
- Accidental Leakage: sending to someone else instead of saving a message
I've exported all data from Saved Messages locally and cleaned it up.
From now on I intend to use a proper note-taking app (Google Keep) for notes,
and I'll only use Saved Messages for saving useful posts and messages and we'll see how maintainable this is.=
There's one flaw to it, which is almost impossible to fix: as soon as I create a Saved Messages chat again and start forwarding stuff to it, I'll be tempted to jot down notes there again.
There's one more approach that exists: very regular cleanups, but in practice it's hard to follow such routine.