Unleashing the Power of Self-Chat: How to Enhance Your Productivity and Efficiency

We’ve become a culture of hackers, always looking for the next shortcut to instant productivity gains. From bullet journals to focus-boosting applications, hacks fly around us daily. For you social media users out there, there is one final hack that, unfortunately, many of you aren’t doing enough: messaging yourself. You could use this smart little life hack to make your life better right now. I know you have a smartphone and a struggling brain. Let’s dig into the art of self-chat and discover why it’s a game-changer.

TAP into Telegram's Boundless Cloud Storage

I started self-messaging on Telegram, which is one of the more popular messaging platforms but isn’t, overall, the best service for that. What it does have, though – I discovered to my delight – was its own underhyped category for self-messaging: ‘Saved Messages’. What Telegram calls its ‘Saved Messages’ category is just its self-messaging service. It works like this: in Telegram, like many messaging platforms, you can send other people any number of media files – images, video, whatever – and it will transmit them to their phones. But you can also, as the self-messaging feature suggests, save these images and videos to your own phone without sending them to another person. That works fine. But for people like me, they don’t necessarily need to send anything. All you need to know is that, behind the scenes, Telegram is uploading all of these files to the cloud – as long as it is below 2GB in size and is not end-to-end encrypted (neither of which you’d want for critical files anyway). As long as it’s there, and as long as I don’t keep uploading too much, using Telegram for non-critical files – the kind that I might not need any more but never want to delete either – has been incredible.

Unlocking Work-Life Balance with Slack

As a writer who likes to keep an eye on the zeitgeist, I found my solution in Slack. As long as I keep my bookmark count to a minimum, I can send myself an intriguing find by messaging myself and, instead of falling down a rabbit warren of bookmarks, I can keep my working space decluttered and use the process to divide my productive work from my private life. Not only that, I don’t have to embarrass myself by sending a message before the draft has finished.

WhatsApp: Your Quick-Access Notepad and File Transfer Tool

I might use WhatsApp more than anything else for messaging. I jot down one-line notes for later, or send files from one device to another. I share articles, videos and reminders for myself. I use its cross-device messages for forwarding files, which I wouldn’t do if they appeared only on the phone.

The Surprising Efficiency of Messaging Yourself

Taking your self-messaging a step further and integrating it into your daily to-do lists is a great way of ensuring that things get done, not only because it’s fast and simple but because the built-in calendar helps you keep it all organised. This feature is well supported across the various platforms, making it easy to create reminders and keep information at your fingertips so you’ll never miss an important date. And so you won’t miss sensitive information, pin those chats to the top of your list and lock your chats for added privacy.

TAP: Unveiling Its Essence

And so, the idea of tapping — whether on your screen to select features, or in the more metaphorical sense of tapping into what your phones and other digital tools can do — surfaces repeatedly in this story, opening up a series of possibilities that makes this self-SMSing hack into a potent agent of self-improvement.

With every self‑message we send, we’re channeling a little more of our productivity into these magical message bottles, wherever we choose to launch them. What if we all turned ourselves into message websites, where we fabricate our own patches of the internet to manage bits of our lives in, on and around clouds? If Slack is your cloud of ideas, why not send yourself an idea? If Telegram is your cloudy spreadsheet, give yourself the spreadsheet. If you want a quick note, a draft of an email, a form to fill out and send, task yourself with it using WhatsApp. Here’s the last step: you do it. You on that screen.