WhatsApp Productivity Hack: Turn Your Favorite Messaging App Into a Productivity Tool

WhatsApp has become one of the indispensable applications on our phones. If you live on EMEA region or travel frequently across borders, I’m sure you’ll agree with me.

I receive about 100+ WhatsApp messages a day: some of these are from family and friends, while the vast majority are from my groups and my clients. One of the biggest reasons why my photo album turned into a garbage is WhatsApp messages with photos.

I try to reply to some of the messages as soon as they reach me or before too long. There are times when I need to take action after a message or I miss messages that contain an important document. When I used the ‘starred messages’ feature offered by WhatApp as a solution, I realized that it did not help me much. And I designed a group system that saved me time.

How I created the group system

First, I turned off the ‘save to camera roll’ option in WhatsApp chat settings. In this way, I got rid of dozens of unnecessary photos that filled my photo album. I set up three different groups with only me as a participant. (After you create a group with one of your contacts, you can remove the other person from the group and create groups that only you are included in.) I gave the following names to the groups:

To Do

Notes

Attachments

As group photos, I used the icon set at this link and enabled the ‘save to camera roll’ option in the group chat settings.

My usage scenario is as follows; I forward the photos I want to keep, files and all attachments related to my workflow to the ‘Attachments’ group, the messages that remind me to take action to the ‘To Do’ group and all my other notes that I need to keep to the ‘Notes’ group. Messages that I organize in this way save me a lot of time.

You can try it on WhatsApp or your favorite messaging app, using a group system similar to what I’ve described, that will meet your own needs.