“What’s the oldest note in your phone?” my younger sister asked, in the same tone one might use to share gossip. She was explaining what she called “notes app digest,” rereading notes like a kind of personal magazine of one’s own insight and nonsense.

I immediately scrolled. For better or worse, my notes app is the piece of technology closest to looking like the inside of my brain: a bit chaotic, annoyingly detail-oriented, and perhaps perpetually nostalgic. While handwritten to-do lists hold my life together, my notes app contains the catch-all, the weird (one that simply says “possum”), and the important (a list of people’s birthdays) coexisting. 

Somehow, the mess of my notes resists all forms of optimization, or even coherence. Venturing back into our notes app isn’t just about fishing out that one password we swore we’d remember, or realizing we drafted a resignation letter in the same note as a reminder to get toilet paper. They are weirdly human markers of time, who and where we’ve been. Amid the endless push to optimize, streamline, and summarize our thoughts, notes have staying power.

For years, people have observed the delightful, vulnerable chaos of the notes app as a counterpoint to hyper-curated feeds. Charley Locke, writing for The Atlantic in 2024, noted that the app is “essentially built-in scratch paper on a phone, and it reveals a person’s digital subconscious.” A 2025 piece by Elahe Izadi for The Washington Post asked strangers to reveal the contents of their notes apps, an act somewhere between a confession and a grand reveal. 

There are many reasons why people still default to writing notes, according to Dr. Bart Wojdynski, professor of journalism at the University of Georgia and director of the Digital Media Attention and Cognition Lab. It’s easy to use, and the icon connotes the idea of jotting on a post-it. “Maybe there’s an extent to which the basicness of the notes app also makes it feel less like it’s being read by our online overlords and used to market you ads,” Wojdynski says. (He noted he hadn’t read the user agreement in a bit, but it might feel “less likely that it’s being scraped to feed some LLM somewhere”). “I think this is related to people trying to have digital copies of their memory,” Wojdynski adds.

Recently, when looking back through notes, Andy Carr, 37, a PhD candidate and part-time adjunct instructor in New York, found something in addition to those for grocery shopping or lesson planning for college courses he teaches. In summer 2020, Carr, his brother, and his sister-in-law were navigating end-of-life care for his mother. There was a jumble of memories, from notes of contacts that hospice care nurses passed along to one reading “Skippy pb jingle—send writer to prison,” a vent about a peanut butter commercial that ran incessantly on the TV at home as the family worked to make his mom comfortable and provide as much physical help as they could.

Revisiting those notes, Carr found affirmation. For years after his mother’s passing, he struggled with feeling that he froze up at the time. The notes showed specific examples of all he had been present for and engaged with around his mother’s death, all of the things he’d taken down as important information to ensure nothing slipped through the cracks. He never deletes messages or notes, he said, and usually, rarely goes back to them: “But little things like this make me really grateful that I can.”

Nadia De Ala, 37, a leadership and negotiation coach who moved to Mexico from the Bay Area two years ago, still has the first note she ever put in the app in 2016: a poem she remembers writing while dreading her commute to a previous job. “I really feel like it’s a time capsule, because it keeps a lot of memories, the essence of who I’ve been at every iteration and season of my life,” she says, adding that it’s even interesting to look back on foods she liked to grocery shop for.

Our phones, in other words, can augment our memories. Julia Soares, assistant professor of psychology at New Mexico State University, says that devices can become “partners for helping us remember things.” 

“You’ll find some very heartfelt things that are digital,” she explains, adding that sometimes people don’t think of these “digital scraps or mementos” as being particularly valuable, but many people hold onto voicemails or even emails. 

Recently, over coffee, one of my dearest friends took me on a tour of her meticulously organized notes. If my notes app functions as the junk drawer of my mind, hers was like opening the door to different beautiful rooms: a list of good things that are happening, checklists for household maintenance, and a folder of notes her sister assembled of their mom’s recipes, complete with videos: a living cookbook. In our conversation, my sister talked about her own notes app discoveries: goals she’d written down only to be met with surprise at how much she’d grown since then, or the minutiae of everyday life she documented for no obvious reason. Other people shared their own earliest notes: addresses of apartments they were touring, passages of favorite books they kept for inspiration, a compliment they’d received, nonsensical thoughts that somehow got funnier the longer they kept them.