Why everyone ends up texting themselves
Two things are true of most people. Forming habits is hard. And texting yourself is the easiest, lowest-effort way to write something down.
If you have ever tried to organize your life in a system like Notion, you know how much it takes to maintain. Every note has to go somewhere, so noting something down becomes a habit you have to build. Most of us don’t.
Texting yourself takes so little effort that it isn’t a habit at all. It’s just something you do. Your own chat is the one place that takes anything in any form: a short message, a document, a big paragraph, a screenshot of a class schedule. And in the moment you want to put something down, the best way is to not decide where it goes.
Where it breaks
Your personal chat is dumb storage. It takes anything, and it gives nothing back. Six hundred messages in, the wifi password is somewhere above the receipt from March, which is somewhere above the address you needed last week.
Nothing in it adds up. Ten messages that say “$18 on lunch” never become how much you spent this month. A birthday you sent yourself in March doesn’t come back in November. The paragraph about the person you met at an event stays a paragraph. The habit is fine. The failure is everything that happens after Send.
What Commonplace does after Send
Commonplace is the same message box, with the other half fixed. You type or say or paste whatever you want, the way you would text it to yourself, and it gets filed into the shape it should be in. An expense becomes a row in an expense tracker. A recipe becomes a page you can cook from. Three things you said about the same person become that person’s page. A movie ticket becomes a reminder that shows up on the right evening with the ticket attached.
The message you sent is kept exactly as you sent it. Right after you send it, you get a short checklist of what it did, and you can open any line to see the page. How it works goes through the whole model, with more examples.
Then it comes back to you
Organizing is only half of it. There is no point in having everything in one place if it just sits there. Commonplace brings things to you when you might need them. When you are at the movie, your ticket is on your home screen. If you have a three-hour gap between classes, it might suggest finishing the assignment that is due in two days. If you told it you had a meeting, it may ask afterwards how it went, and file your answer on its own.
The effort stays the same
There is one input bar, and it takes text, voice, photos, screenshots, files, PDFs and links. You don’t pick a category. You don’t tell it whether something is a note, a task, an expense or an event. If you know how to text, you already know everything you need to use it.
Why I built it
I was always better at building the system than using it. I have ADHD, so if I don’t put something somewhere immediately, there is a good chance it is gone. I tried every system there is. I would spend hours setting one up, then stop using it because I got too lazy to maintain it, and go back to texting myself.
Eventually I realized I needed somewhere I could just dump things and trust that they would end up where they belonged. That is what Commonplace is.
Rishi, founder