Surefire Hack for Remembering to Respond to Texts


Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll share the sure fire method I use to remember to respond to text messages. 
I have a foolproof way to remember to respond to and follow up on emails.  You can watch my video on that if you are interested. The problem is that more and more people are using text messaging to ask questions, make plans, and otherwise communicate things that require responses and follow up from me.  This is a problem because of the way that the text messaging app has been designed. Since I have an iPhone and iPad, like most people I use the iMessage app provided by default from Apple. Here are three of the problems I have with it. 
  • Can’t save texts - With email, there is a way to save important emails somewhere else, so you can delete emails out of your inbox. I get my inbox to zero once daily.  I get rid of all emails I’ve dealt with and leave emails in my inbox that i still need to respond to.  With text messaging there is no way to save messages, so most people just keep all of their messages. 
  • Can’t mark unread - this drives me nuts since it seems like it would be such a simple way to handle this problem.  As you might know, once you have read a text message, there is no way to mark it unread.  With email, you can do this so easily, watch.  I have read this message, now it’s marked as unread.  That way, if you are someone who does not get to email zero everyday, this is an easy way to indicate to yourself that you need to deal with this message, right?  That would be great with iMessage. I have to remember to respond to this when i have more info, but unfortunately there is no way to do this within iMessage, so messages that you need to deal with get lost with everything else. 
  • Can’t save groups - if you have a group that you text, iMessafe only remembers that group if you keep the text string.  If you delete the string, it doesn’t remember that Group ever existed.  This is annoying because 1) I don’t want to have to type in everyone’s contacts each time and 2) it doesn’t retain the group name if you have one. Also, and I’m not 100% sure on this, but I think you run the risk of starting a new text string which will be annoying to everyone on the group chat. 
So, here is my workaround. It’s not great, but it’s better than any other system I have tried. I have both an iPad and iPhone where I receive text messages.  First, I established my iPad as my primary texting device, because that IS actually the device I use the most.  Now, for most text conversations, I go ahead and delete them on my iPad unless I am waiting to hear back or I need to respond. There are 2 group text strings that I keep because I text on them several times a week and don’t want to mess up the group name, retype the contacts, OR split to a new conversation. Everything else I delete.  So, anything that is still there is waiting for resolution or waiting for me to act on it.  On my secondary device, my iPhone, I don’t delete anything. I use it for an archive and go back to retrieve old messages. And I can keep group conversations that I don’t text on frequently in my iPhone and respond to them from that device to rejuvenate the conversation and bring it back onto my iPad.  
I have tried a bunch of other tricks, like forwarding texts as emails or texting to myself, but ultimately texts were falling through the cracks. This is the system that has worked the best so far. I’d love to know how you handle this!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!

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