Inside the Notes app: We asked strangers to show us their Notes app. Here’s what we learned

Open up your Notes app right now and show us what’s in there.

“Absolutely not,” Alanna Lutch, 25, of Florida, says with a laugh.

Fair response! We’re strangers, after all.

If you want to get to know a person, you could look at their Instagram profile or their TikTok page or their Facebook posts, or what they are posting on X or Bluesky or Truth Social.

But the truth also lies within the Notes app: keeper of shopping lists, graveyard of text message drafts, organiser of trips, repository of measurements for … what were those for, anyway? It’s where we keep the fragments of our lives not worth publicising, too private to post, too important to forget, too forgettable to remember.

We asked strangers a vulnerable question: Will you let us look inside your Notes app?

“It is shocking what I’m looking at right now,” says Sasha Taskier, 35, of DC, bravely opening up hers for The Washington Post.

She is looking at 100 notes she’s written over the past five months. “Some of them are one word,” she says. “It’s honestly chaos in here.”

There is order in the chaos. And an order: the favourite Starbucks orders of her kids’ teachers. Decaf Americano, tall iced white mocha, white mocha soy latte with an extra shot, black Americano. Ms Taskier is a room parent and likes to treat the teachers to “nice little moments.”

Christopher Davis’s most recent note is also a coffee order. It’s for his mother. The 24-year-old DC resident wrote the one that appears next while in church.

Ice brown sugar espresso

Followed by:

Father

The son

The holy spirit Chruchnew1

He had felt divine love in his heart. “I just put down what I can feel,” Davis says, “which is, he be feeling me.”

And, also, he didn’t want to forget his mother’s coffee order.

The holy and the banal.

Notes is where you can find the real (if incomplete) answers to social media prompts such as “What’s on your mind?” or “What’s happening?”

For Olivia Norman of DC, what was happening November 8, 2016, was this:

Had popcorn and wine on the phone with mum. Hillary Clinton looks like she might win.

Oh no

On Jan. 6, 2021:

Talked, everyone is okay.

On March 7, 2022:

Hopkins recommends chemo because the Ki-67 is high.

She kept her breast cancer updates mostly off of social media while she was still in the thick of it, but all the details are stored in her notes. Chemo was OK, she wrote on her first day of the treatment. Had to take a break because the meds made me cold and a little short of breath.

“These are heavy, but I’m going to keep them,” the 40-year-old says now of the cancer notes.

“Just to remember what it felt like walking in and going into that chemo room. And also, I never want to think about it, but if I ever get a recurrence, I know exactly what was done the first time.”

Reading old Notes app entries can be like stepping into a time machine, different from flipping through photos or scrolling old posts.

You can look at an old photo from a trip and see who you were to the world. But rereading a packing list - charger, toothpaste, vitamins - will remind you of what it was actually like to be you.

“I have notes from a breastfeeding class I took before I became a parent,” Ms Taskier says. She was pregnant with her first when she wrote those notes. Her daughter is now 8.

Michael Lussier, 36, has his speech for his sister’s summer wedding on a note he has shared with his mother so they can edit it together. It’s amazing to see how you’ve grown into the beautiful and kind woman you are today. You’ve always been there for me, especially after our dad left, and your strength and positive spirit have always been an inspiration to me and Mum.

It’s followed by the German translation his Notes app generated (they can do that now) that he immediately texted to his non-English speaking relatives after he delivered it.

Most smartphones have some kind of note-keeping app, but Notes is probably the most ubiquitous; it has come preinstalled in every iPhone since the first generation hit the market in 2007, and it’s also currently on the 2.35 billion active Apple devices in use worldwide. (Apple doesn’t have public data on how often this particular app is used.)

Since its introduction, there have been some updates to the tech, but the design of it has largely remained the same. Open it up and just start writing.

The most recently opened note on Karen Follett’s phone is a list of all 50 states with an introduction. Studies show that out of 50 states, 8 is the average number most people have visited.

Sadly, many never leave the state in which they were born. Most states on Ms Follett’s phone have green check mark emojis next to them. A handful have heart emojis, and “that’s this trip,” the Texas resident said during an interview in front of the US Capitol.

Taylor Pham, a 26-year-old tourist from London, has lists of shows to watch, crossword puzzle guesses - perish revoke vendor beloved culprit trust lock of hair persevere - and New Year’s resolutions. She hadn’t looked at the resolutions since writing them down last year, until now.

“Yeah, I haven’t done any of them,” she says. She reads more closely and corrects herself … Solo trip. “I’m doing that now, in a way.”

Ms Pham does have a more regularly visited list: Future wedding guests. She is not planning a wedding.

“I just want to see like who would make it to my guest list,” she says. It’s a way for her to assess her relationships, whom she feels close to and who has faded away.

Mr Lussier is methodical in using his notes to assist with his relationships. He has one dedicated to each good friend or friend group. There are 46 of them. He opens one. It includes the friend’s birthday, the day they met and the first time they went on a trip together. But other notes include commentary on the friend’s recent life events, goals or topics of conversation they wanted a follow-up on.

Finding time to spend with friends becomes more challenging as you age, he says, and “you lose a lot of the capacity to be able to be as agile as you used to be and remember all those details.”

So when he is finally able to sync up with a friend, “we can make sure that time is meaningful and that we’re actually enjoying each other’s presence. We’re following up on those things that are important to each other.”

Elena Torres, a comedian and mother of two, says, “I’m always running around, and usually the best joke ideas don’t come when you’re sitting at your desk right in the perfect moment, or when you have a pen and paper.” So they go into her Notes app.

Next to grocery lists (bananas, snacks, almond milk) and Williams Sonoma items to purchase (Air fryer?), Ms Torres has written Messi out loud, reading by my dad.

That was a premise that turned into a fully formed joke about how Ms Torres’s dad relishes any bad press about soccer legend Lionel Messi. Other joke premises she has drafted in Notes can be harder to decipher.

“I have one that’s just titled 10 to 12 deep, and that’s it. I don’t know what that means,” Ms Torres says. “My guess is I think I was trying to talk about going places with 10 to 12 people with you? I don’t know.”

Rel Robinson, 30, a San Francisco-based artist, sees these thought fragments as art. She published a collection called “iPhone Notes,” screenshots of notes from a group of prominent poets and novelists as part of Conventional Projects, an alternative publication project. The contents in the collection vary: stanzas, gardening lists, and insights jotted down on a plane.

“We have our personal PR pages, you know, things like our Instagrams and the ways that we want to be perceived in the world. And then there’s all of the stuff that came before it and was produced in situ or in the process of its construction,” she says.

“I see the Notes app as this incredible repository for the sort of marginalia of our hybridised lives of living with machines, as machines.”

It could be a fun party game: Open up your Notes app and guess the meaning of things that are no longer intelligible.

For Justine White, 30, tucked next to bachelorette planning, a massive packing list for a recent camping trip with her husband and lists of clothes she is planning to sell online, is this:

1 & 6 loop

4 standalone

3 & 5 loop

“What is that?” she asks us, as if we have any clue. But it was something, at one point.

Our memories fail us. That’s the primary reason so many rely on phones - as a sort of second brain, one with ample capacity and instant recall.

Swipe cards not working, then report several times, continue staff not able to use them, reads a recent note by Kym McCoosh, 57. Her Notes app is filled with running commentary from staff meetings.

“I’m a menopausal woman, and you forget things so quickly,” she says.

Rylee Steelman is still in college and also needs help remembering. She can’t start her day without a to-do list, and this day’s includes fixing her résumé and filling out a job application. That note lives near one titled “Betrayal List.” (It’s a TikTok trend, she explains.) People who walk or talk slow. Humidity. People who call me on the phone.

Ben Tugendstein, 30, keeps a wish list on his phone because “whenever people ask me what I want for a birthday or the holidays or something, I can never remember.” (Nice chess set ranks high, for those wondering.)

Jasmine Williams, 21, of California, wrote a bucket list while she was still in high school. She is in her last year of college, but she has forgotten one thing: the password she used to protect the note.

“I was trying so hard to unlock it,” she says, “but it’s completely locked.”

If only she had written it down somewhere.

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