Text and voice mail reference location

CamJPete

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Good day all. I am working to clear all my inboxes to zero. In doing so, I am struggling to find a good place to file reference text messages and voice messages on the iphone. I realize that I can download messages using software, and keep them on my home computer, but it often seems tedious to have to do this every day for text messages I'd like to save. Plus, if I don't have access to my home computer and I need the message away from home, it is not accessible. I was just curious what solutions others have developed for this. I have a few in mind, but wanted to draw on others' experience.

I realize this has probably been discussed a lot, but after several forum and google searching, I haven't been able to find any relevant discussions. Thank you for your help.
 

tjhoo

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Very timely post. I realized that I was forgetting to followup things that were in my text messages. So I started scanning texts daily to search for possible next actions. iOS messages will let you forward a text to email. So I've been emailing texts with next actions to Evernote. Or if it's for a calendar item I'll forward it to Outlook and put it on the calendar.

Have a feeling this is going to be helpful. A similar process I started a couple years ago is scanning my "sent emails" folder in Outlook daily. Here, either flagging things that need to be followed up by e-mail, or sending to Evernote.
 

wjlynch

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I have work voicemail automatically forwarded to my Evernote account which then automatically forwards a link to NirvanaHQ via a Zapier recipe. Texts for me are not so much an issue as I handle those as "less then 2 min tasks". If there is something I need to reference, I take a screenshot and send it to Evernote which again forwards it to NirvanaHQ via Zapier.
 

tjhoo

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wjlynch said:
I have work voicemail automatically forwarded to my Evernote account which then automatically forwards a link to NirvanaHQ via a Zapier recipe. Texts for me are not so much an issue as I handle those as "less then 2 min tasks". If there is something I need to reference, I take a screenshot and send it to Evernote which again forwards it to NirvanaHQ via Zapier.

I like the screenshot idea. Need to do that more like my kids do :)
 

PTKen

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Screenshot to Evernote for text messages is a very nice idea I had not thought of. Evernote even parses the text so it is searchable. Nice!

It's a lot of steps on the phone, but it's better than nothing.
 

Mike Simms

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Hi CamJPete,
You may want to keep the messages themselves, but I look at it from a different point of view: why not take each message then "squeeze all the juice out of it" and delete it?
Say someone recommended you a book or a restaurant by text: put it on you books to think about list / restaurants to try list.
Say they asked you to do something: are you then committing to an action or project to put on those lists?
Someone tells you about an event, and you may be interested in going to it when the time comes around - I would put it on my calendar. I'll decide at another time if I can/will/want to attend.
 

Oogiem

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Mike Simms said:
I look at it from a different point of view: why not take each message then "squeeze all the juice out of it" and delete it?
I never delete e-mail because far too may times I have to go pull it out again sometime int eh future. Sometimes decades in the future, so I archive everything. For me I have to pull all actions and other items out into separate places because the e-mail will stay intact in the big reference section for as long as I can keep moving the history from one computer to anther. I did finally lose one whole class of messages from my early Compuserve days because I didn't do the data conversion when I still had all the tools to do it. Now that's a part of every software and system upgrade I do, verify that old archives are still readable and do the file conversions if necessary.
 

devon.marie

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Oogiem said:
I never delete e-mail because far too may times I have to go pull it out again sometime int eh future. Sometimes decades in the future, so I archive everything. For me I have to pull all actions and other items out into separate places because the e-mail will stay intact in the big reference section for as long as I can keep moving the history from one computer to anther. I did finally lose one whole class of messages from my early Compuserve days because I didn't do the data conversion when I still had all the tools to do it. Now that's a part of every software and system upgrade I do, verify that old archives are still readable and do the file conversions if necessary.

Same. You can't reply to an email that's deleted, and it's good email etiquette to not start a new thread with your reply.
 

CamJPete

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Thanks for the responses.

I think a solution for reference material / project support material is to simply copy the information to another storage location. If there is contact information like and address, I could put it under contacts in my phone. If there is a string of texts I want to keep for nostalgic reasons, I would probably need to download those and save them on my computer's hard drive.

I suppose my question is about more than just reference texts. When I have an email I need to respond to, I move it to my actions folder, or to a project support folder and put the corresponding action in my system. But with texts, I have nowhere to move the texts to. My inbox then becomes a combination of "collect" and "needs action". I suppose I could just delete the text as long I've extracted the information I needed into my next action, then create a new one when I am ready to send it. I just have to make sure I've "squeezed all the juice" out of the text into my system before deleting so that my response stays within context.
 

Mike Simms

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100% in agreement about not deleting e-mails - I was thinking more of voice and SMS messages.
In respect of e-mails, when I want to zero out the e-mail inbox, typically at the end of the day, and there are mails that I need more than a few minutes:
- the email gets archived i.e. it goes into its permanent archive location, which in my case is the one folder for a whole year's e-mails (per account)
- an action or (very often possible a project and a next action) gets created in my main list manager.
So there is no in-between place for e-mails to wait until they are done with.
 

Fredjclaus

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When I'm going through my emails, the point isn't to delete them but clear out my inbox. If I have a message that needs to be followed up on, I move it to a specific folder in my account so it's out of my inbox. If I'm done with the project that I saved all the emails for I delete them. Now if it's information I need to keep for future reference I will forward it to my evernote and save it under the reference notebook.

As for text messages I don't get too many that I need to keep, but when I do I screen shot and upload the picture to evernote. I also have an account on Google Photos, and even though I have an iPhone I can still upload picture to Google Photos, and save them in an album called Text Messages. I like to do evernote more often though because it's easier to organize the text messages based on the topic.
 
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