Announced in message center notification MC390416 (June 9, 2022), the Microsoft Teams chat with self capability is rolling out to tenants and should be fully deployed worldwide by late June. According to MC390416, “users will now be able to chat with themselves. All the same chat functionality that works for chatting with others will work for the individual chatting with themselves.”
Update (July 20): Microsoft says that the deployment of the Chat with Self feature is rolling out but won’t be complete until “late September.”
Microsoft 365 roadmap item 88066 solemnly tells us that the new feature allows users to “send themselves notes, messages, files and images/videos; helping them stay organized.” Microsoft 365 offers a plethora of applications wanting to help users to stay organized, including Tasks in Teams, Planner, To Do, Outlook Tasks, Outlookcalendar boards, Project, OneNote, and so on. Chatting with yourself takes self-organization to a different plane.
People have sent messages to themselves as aide memoires for many years using SMS, emails, and just about every other messaging platform (here’s how Slack delivers the same kind of capability). I usually send myself an email using Outlook mobile when the need arises. The idea behind the “chat with self” feature is based on user experience and practice. Microsoft believes that people will use chat with self to make notes, list things they must do, and so on, or maybe just let off some steam about the latest mistake by co-workers/management/anyone else in a one-way conversation.
There have always been situations where someone ended up as the only person in a chat, such as when everyone else left a group chat. Many blogs are available to tell you how to create a chat with yourself by creating a meeting and using its chat. These are workarounds for what became an obvious gap for Microsoft to fill (), which is what they’ve now done.
Starting Chat with Self
To chat with themselves, a user starts a chat by entering their own name as the chat participant. Teams display a screen to recognize the special nature of the chat (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Teams chat with self is all about you
You can’t transform the special chat with self into a regular chat by adding more people to it, but you can create a Loop component in the chat and make it available by sharing the link to the loop file in OneDrive for Business to allow other people to open and interact with the component, which is what I did in with the Loop paragraph shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Teams chat with self and a Loop component
The LinkedIn tab opens your own LinkedIn profile, as you’d imagine. I guess that’s useful if you want to check what appears on your profile.
Other Lonely Chats
There’s not much else to say about chat with self, apart from the important note that you can only have one chat with yourself. You might also have other chats where only you are present, but these chats are different because they started off with multiple people and gradually reduced to just you because the other participants left the conversation in some manner (voluntarily, another participant removed them, or following the deletion of their account).
Teams marks chats with non-existent accounts as “Just me” (Figure 3) while the chat with yourself is marked with your name and (You) – in case you forget who you’re chatting with. Unlike regular chats, you can’t change the name of the chat with self or a Just me chat.
Figure 3: A Teams Just Me chat
If you don’t want to use Chat with Self, unpin the entry from the Chats list and you won’t see it again unless you want to send yourself something. When you do, start a chat with your email address and Chat with Self will reappear.
Ready to Chat with Self
It’s a fair bet that the Teams chat with self feature will be popular with end users. After all, they can do the same kind of thing with other email and messaging applications, so why not with Teams? I don’t know if I’ll use it, but my self-focused chat is ready and willing to accept my deepest thoughts, so we shall see what happens in the future.
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I think this chat with self feature depends on the license. I had it 2 years ago for my school account but just got it this morning for my work account.
Did you have the current Chat with Self implementation or was it just that some chats degraded to a point where you were the only one left (the other participants had their accounts deleted) and a chat became a lonely place? I have some of those chats hanging around…
Ditto what bmax1985 said. Nobody can find anything around here anymore due to the proliferation of communication channels: email, Team chat, Team channel chats, channel wikis, Team meeting chats, one note, outlook task, SharePoint… We’re working on standards & processes to address the issue and it would be helpful to have the option to narrow down options technically.
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I agree with keepitss, this is just another place for things to get lost.
Actually, this feature would be quite helpful if I could use it for sending pictures, files etc. from my mobile phone to the Teams chat with yourself, which is for me not possible. So, I hope, that Microsoft will work on it to make it possible sending content from the phone directly to the Chat with yourself. Anyone has a solution for it?
Make it go away! Or at the very least make it actually PERMANTLY hide-able. At this date and time, I find it completely useless and extremely irritating. I cannot get used to seeing it and always second guess just what the heck it is when I actually receive a chat message from a colleague.
I could find it useful, if I could e.g. use some apps like Whiteboard, for sticking notes on and drawing/writing on. But as there aren’t any available, chatting with myself is pointless.
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I think this chat with self feature depends on the license. I had it 2 years ago for my school account but just got it this morning for my work account.
Did you have the current Chat with Self implementation or was it just that some chats degraded to a point where you were the only one left (the other participants had their accounts deleted) and a chat became a lonely place? I have some of those chats hanging around…
Now how do we disable it? I have no need to chat with myself and it keeps coming back
You can’t. It’s part of Teams.
Ditto what bmax1985 said. Nobody can find anything around here anymore due to the proliferation of communication channels: email, Team chat, Team channel chats, channel wikis, Team meeting chats, one note, outlook task, SharePoint… We’re working on standards & processes to address the issue and it would be helpful to have the option to narrow down options technically.
I agree with keepitss, this is just another place for things to get lost.
Most useless feature in Teams.
Actually, this feature would be quite helpful if I could use it for sending pictures, files etc. from my mobile phone to the Teams chat with yourself, which is for me not possible. So, I hope, that Microsoft will work on it to make it possible sending content from the phone directly to the Chat with yourself. Anyone has a solution for it?
how do you keep notes that you enter in your chat with myself space? every time I log in the content is blank
They are regular chats, so they should be persistent. At least, they are for me.
Make it go away! Or at the very least make it actually PERMANTLY hide-able. At this date and time, I find it completely useless and extremely irritating. I cannot get used to seeing it and always second guess just what the heck it is when I actually receive a chat message from a colleague.
I could find it useful, if I could e.g. use some apps like Whiteboard, for sticking notes on and drawing/writing on. But as there aren’t any available, chatting with myself is pointless.