Habits from talking to people · habit 26 of 40

Sending yourself a note

The message you send to yourself is the one nobody thinks of as a message. There is no recipient to consider and no tone to get right, and it has arrived before you have put the phone down.

The habit

You send an address or a short string to your own inbox so that it is waiting on the device you are about to pick up.

Why it is automatic

This one came from work. A document had to be on the machine at home, the shared drive needed a login nobody remembered, and mailing it to yourself took four seconds. Nobody teaches it because nobody has to.

It also outlived every sync product built since. Cloud folders wanted an account and a client. Handoff features wanted matching hardware with the same login active on both ends. Messaging yourself needed none of that, and it worked on an old or borrowed device as well as on a new one.

Then there is the memory part. An inbox is a search box that has never lost anything, and people trust that archive more than they trust their own filing.

What it actually does here

The note leaves the device and lands on a server belonging to somebody else. It is written into the sent folder, delivered into the inbox, and both copies live under an account that usually carries a real name, a recovery number and a payment record from some subscription or other.

Both copies are indexed. That is the feature rather than a side effect: mail search is fast because the text has already been read and put into an index. What you pasted is not sitting in a file somewhere, it is a search result waiting for the right two words to be typed.

The copies do not stop at two. Every client signed into that account pulls the message down, which means the phone, the tablet, the desktop client on the machine at work and the old handset in a drawer that still has the password saved. Whatever backup runs on any of those copies it again, on its own schedule.

Drafts count as well. Mail clients and chat apps save drafts to the server while you type, so that a long message survives a crash. A note you thought better of has usually made the trip anyway. Deleting it removes the entry from the list you can see, and not necessarily the copies taken before you changed your mind.

Drafts are already saved

The unsent version is the part people get wrong. Autosave was built to protect long messages from crashed browsers and flat batteries, and it does that by writing upstream every few keystrokes rather than to the machine in front of you.

• Mail clients keep drafts in a Drafts folder, which syncs like every other folder on the account.
• Chat apps hold an unsent message in the box on every signed in device, which means it was carried between them to get there.
• Notes apps with a sync toggle upload when you save, not when you share.
• Deleting the draft afterwards clears the visible entry rather than the copies already made.

The second copy nobody pictures

Ask most people how many copies a self addressed note makes and the honest answer is one. The real answer is a small pile, and nothing in the pile is hidden, unusual or the result of anyone doing something wrong.

On the way out

The sent copy, held under the account you were signed into when you typed it.

On the way in

The delivered copy, filed in the inbox and added to the search index.

On each device

One copy per signed in client, including the ones you have stopped using.

In the backup

Whatever the provider or the handset keeps by default, on a schedule you did not set.

What to do instead

The replacement has to be about as fast as the original or it will not survive contact with a real evening. Two seconds is the budget, and most of these notes are moved for a convenience that turns out never to be used.

1. Write it on paper and keep the paper. Paper syncs to nothing and cannot be found by typing two words into a search box.
2. If the string only ever needs to exist on one device, type it there once and stop moving it between machines.
3. Where you already unlock a password manager on both devices, its note field keeps text in the same container as the logins rather than in a mailbox built for delivery and search.
4. Turn draft syncing off where the client offers the setting, and check whether the notes app is uploading on save rather than on demand.
5. When something genuinely has to be sent, send the part that is useless on its own: the reminder to look, not the thing to look at.

How to notice you did it anyway

This is the easiest habit on the site to audit, because the archive that stores it was designed to find things for you.

• Search your own mail for the subject lines you would have used, including the empty one.
• Open the Drafts folder on every account you hold, not only the one you read daily.
• Look through sent messages addressed to yourself over the last year.
• Check the notes app, and anything else that quietly syncs text, including calendar entries and reminders.
• On the phone, look at the share sheet suggestions, since it remembers who you send things to and you are on that list.

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