One thing that bothers me about text messaging is how it ends up being a system more like instant messaging rather than short e-mails.

I can label an e-mail, mark it as important, or otherwise make it distinct. I can search through e-mails, find previous messages, and easily manage the content.

With text messaging, there aren’t such easy ways to manage things. When someone sends me a message that is important, I have no way of flagging it as such to easily find it again.

Also, unless I actively save my text messages, or change my phone settings to some other arbitrary number, it will only store the latest few hundred messages and with it sometimes being a stream of thought, much like instant messaging, important details will be lost off of my phone quite quickly.

I often lose important text messages, and am trying to get in the habit of copying the data to other systems, including e-mailing myself the details so that I have them later. I mark them with a label in Gmail and then have an easy way to both sort and search them, but the system feels very silly to me because I feel it should be native.

What do you think, have you lost important information sent to you because there wasn’t an easy way to recall a previous text message? Let me know in the comments!