WhatsApp notes to self: turn your chat into notes, to-dos and reminders

Messaging yourself on WhatsApp is a perfectly good way to take notes. For about two weeks. Then the chat has 300 messages in it, a grocery list sits on top of a flat deposit reminder, and the one link you wanted is somewhere above a photo of a parking spot.

The feature isn't the problem. A plain chat with yourself has no idea what each message is. This post covers how to set it up, how to make it last a bit longer, and what to do when you outgrow it.

How do you message yourself on WhatsApp?

WhatsApp added a proper "message yourself" chat in late November 2022, according to TechCrunch's report from the time. Before that people made a group with one friend and then removed the friend. You don't need that trick any more.

1. Open WhatsApp and tap the new chat button.
2. Find your own name or number near the top of the contact list and tap it.
3. Type, record a voice note or attach something. It lands in a chat only you can see.

If your own entry shows up as a bare phone number, your contact card isn't saved on the phone. Save one for yourself and the name appears. On the web and desktop versions it works the same way: new chat, pick yourself. Menu labels shift between app updates, so if a button has moved, look for the new chat icon first.

Once it exists, pin it. A pinned chat stays at the top of your list, which is the single biggest thing you can do to stop forgetting that the chat exists.

What does a notes-to-self chat do well?

More than people expect. It opens fast because you already have WhatsApp open all day. It takes text, voice notes, photos, documents and links without caring which. It syncs to your other devices. And forwarding something from another chat into it takes two taps, which is how a lot of people save an address or a recipe a friend sent.

It also has no learning curve. There's nothing to set up and no folders to design. For a few notes a week, that's hard to beat, and you should probably stop reading and just do it.

Where does it break down?

The trouble starts around the time the chat gets long. Everything is one flat stream in the order you sent it, and nothing in it has a type.

• A to-do and an idea look identical. Nothing tells you which one still needs doing.
• There are no reminders. WhatsApp will happily hold "call the bank on Friday" for months and never say a word on Friday.
• Finding something means remembering a word you used. Searching for "gift" misses the message where you wrote "present for Dev".
• Done things never leave. You can't tick anything off, so the chat becomes a pile of notes about things that stopped mattering weeks ago.

Android Police made a similar point when it looked at using WhatsApp for notes in January 2023: it works for occasional note-taking, and dedicated note apps are better at organising. That was true then and it's true now, as far as I can tell.

Can you make a plain self-chat work better?

A little. These habits cost nothing and push the breaking point back a few weeks.

Start every message with a word that says what it is. "todo", "idea", "link", "buy". It's clumsy, but it makes the search box useful, because you can search for "todo" and get only the things you meant to do.

Star the messages that matter. Starred messages are gathered in one list, so you have a short list of important things instead of one long scroll.

Put dates in the text, written the same way each time, like "fri 7 nov". You'll still have to look at them yourself, though, because nothing will do it for you.

Use a second chat for things that have a deadline. Some people keep one self-chat for notes and a group of just themselves for tasks. It helps for a while, then you have two piles.

What is the difference between a note, a to-do and a reminder?

This is the part a self-chat can't do, and it's worth being clear about because the three get mixed up constantly.

A note is something to keep and find later: a Wi-Fi password, a gift idea, a thing you want to tell the plumber. A to-do is something you have to act on, so it needs a done state. A reminder is a to-do with a time attached, where the time is the whole point.

A notes app is good at the first. A task app is good at the second and third. WhatsApp, on its own, is good at none of them, but it's the one place where you'll actually type the thought. So the real job is getting the message out of the stream and into the right shelf without you doing the sorting.

How do you turn the chat into notes, to-dos and reminders?

There are three routes, in rough order of effort.

Do the sorting yourself. Copy things from the self-chat into a notes app or a task list when you have a quiet minute. It works if you're disciplined about it, and most people aren't, which is why the pile grows.

Set reminders outside WhatsApp. Your phone's own reminders app can take a due time. It's solid, and I'd use it if I only needed reminders. The cost is that your notes live in one place and your reminders in another.

Send the message to something that sorts it. This is where Jotto comes in. It's a chat contact you message on WhatsApp, and it works out what each message is and files it. You can read more about the notes and reminders side on the reminders page. Here's roughly what that looks like.

What does this look like with Jotto?

You write the way you'd write to yourself. Say you send "renew passport on the 3rd at 10am". Jotto replies with a tick, the task, the due time and a tag it picked, and files it as a to-do. A message like "idea: chai and samosa stall at the sunday market" comes back as a saved note with a tag. A pasted link comes back saved under the page's own title.

Three things make this more than a tidier self-chat.

• The to-do gets a reminder. Jotto schedules it for the due time and sends it as a WhatsApp message in your chat with Jotto, once. It doesn't repeat. If you send a to-do with no time in it, the reply offers two times to tap, or "No reminder".
• You can fix things by replying. Reply to a confirmation with the correction and Jotto changes the saved item. Send "undo" and it takes back the last thing it filed.
• A note can become a to-do. Notes come with a button to convert them, or you can reply "todo" to a note.

Voice works too. Jotto transcribes a voice note, up to ten minutes, and files what you said the same way as typed text. A rambling "remind me to tell the plumber the tap drips" on a walk comes out as one tidy item, not a transcript to read through later.

How do you find things again?

Everything lands on a dashboard you open in the browser, with notes, to-dos and saved links on separate screens. Search there looks for any word you type in your notes and links, and your notes carry tags you can filter by. In the chat itself you can ask things like "what's due this week?", "my latest notes" or "send me my last bookmark".

Be aware of one limit. The chat answers recall questions, but it doesn't search your notes by topic. For that you use the dashboard search.

What doesn't it do?

Worth saying plainly, because it decides whether this fits you.

• To-dos don't repeat. Each has one due time and gets one reminder. Bills and subscriptions are different, and Jotto reminds you before each one is due, but that's a separate feature.
• It isn't a notes app with folders, nested pages or rich formatting. A note is a short piece of text with tags.
• It's English for now. It also isn't shared. There are no joint lists or accounts for two people.
• There's no native app. The dashboard installs as a web app on your phone, and the chat is WhatsApp.

And on privacy: Jotto only receives the messages you send to it, never your other chats or contacts. That's a different arrangement from a chat with yourself, so if a note is the sort you'd rather keep in that chat, keep it there.

What does it cost?

The free plan covers 50 logged messages a month. Questions and corrections don't count toward that. Pro removes the cap, and the current prices are on the pricing section of the homepage. Notes and to-dos share the same allowance as anything else you log, so a heavy month of everything will use it up faster than a month of notes alone.

Which should you pick?

If you write fewer than a handful of notes a week and mostly remember to look at them, the plain self-chat is fine. Pin it, start each message with a word, and carry on.

If you keep finding that a deadline went past because the note sat in the chat, you need something that sends the reminder and tracks what's done. That's the point at which sorting by hand stops being worth your time.

The same chat also handles the other things people try to track by text. If you're curious, there are posts on tracking calories on WhatsApp and tracking expenses on WhatsApp. A good first step is to send Jotto one real to-do with a time and see whether the reminder arrives when you expect it.