The one change that worked: I set my phone to ‘do not disturb’ three years ago – and have never looked back
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This should be the default on new phones. I enabled it the first time I got a call at 3AM from one of my clients. Many people just have no respect.
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Google hardware is actually solid. Just don't run Google software.
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Your online status did all the heavy lifting to communicate when you had some free time and felt like chatting.
A lot of modern messengers implement a similar feature but I disable them or manually set it to "away" perpetually. Using DND makes much more sense. I just tell people they can message me literally any time they want but I will not see or respond to them until later.
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Very different these days. The beauty of the status bubbles and messengers of past is that you would catch each other when you both had time and desire to chat and then you'd have a back and forth conversation until one of you disengaged. You also almost never have people sending offline messages. It was more akin to an in-person interaction where you're either visibly there and someone can approach and talk to you in real time or you aren't.
Texting is generally of a blend between real-time messenging (but you can't tell if they're available) and short form email where everyone interacts differently and has their own ideas about "proper" etiquette. It's probably somewhat cultural but in my experience, people just use messaging apps in the exact same way as they would text, so status bubbles don't mean much.
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I’m probably a nightmare to get hold of at a moment’s notice – and should never, ever be someone’s In Case of Emergency, much to my partner’s chagrin.
Any phone will allow you to still receive notifications for a select contacts or numbers that call repeatedly with DND on so that's something she's chosen which I would be offended by if I was her partner, especially considering they have two young children.
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Most allow you to also nominate VIP contacts that always get through, he should dump her
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A lot of them already do call twice in a row, thanks apple.
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I love scheduled and automation based DND, except that about twice per year, SOMETHING SOMEWHERE updates and causes my alarm to be silenced by DND, despite having my clock app exempted from every possible silencing mechanism I can find.
For the life of me, I can't understand why that would ever be a useful behavior, let along default one.
Lucky for me, I have a pretty robust internal clock, but Holy Fuck is that annoying.
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Yes, me too. My phone is always silent and with Do Not Disturb on. Only few family contacts can get through, and only with a phone call.
I don't even know what's the sound of the notifications of my phone. It's blissful.
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Ignoring a text that "I can answer later" is actually what hits me with most cognitive charge :
My current balance is :
- To never give notification permission except when it is necessary for the core goal of the application.
- Automatically enable do not disturb from 11pm until alarm clock.
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I just turned off notifications for everything, except Signal and banking apps. Most convenient solution IMO.
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I appreciate that Android changed from an opt-out to an opt-in model when it comes to notification permissions, but it's still not enough.
I can't believe the mobile OS world became so much worse than actual computing. What a corporate hell scape. -
Tbh not surprised. In 2012 I got my first smartphone, it ran Android. At first I thought it was just like a PC. Within half an hour I was fed up at how useless it was.
Can't even open a terminal window and apt install apache, what a load of junk.
Tried a pinephone and that is almost perfect but it struggled with SMS. If that was more reliable I think it would be the perfect phone.
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All my phones have always been on DnD, I don't even know how my ringtone sounds.
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I've had mine on vibrate for years. Texting doesn't trigger it, only calls. It's been great.
I look at my phone only when I'm ready to look at it. -
Headlines like this are annoying AF. You wouldn't want your doctor keeping their phone on DND 24/7.
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Hmm maybe I should try this
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Your doctor has a work phone that is available only during hours.
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I keep Do Not Disturb on most of the time and my wife can contact me at any time. Her and a few others are flagged as exceptions.
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I've been activelly managing my mobile phone pretty much like that since the 90s because after getting my first mobile phone I quickly figured out that if allowed to the thing just turned into a source of near-constant urgent non-essential alerts, in other words, unnecessary stress.
Decades ago, I learned about the whole 4 quadrants thing in management:
https://www.testprepchampions.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/4quadrantstimemanagement-1024x768.jpgYou're supposed to work mostly in the "Important Non-Urgent" quadrant as much as possible and mobile phones if not properly managed constantly pull you to the "Not Important, Not Urgent" which is the worst quadrant to be working in.
In this perspective the problem with mobile phones (and e-mail also to a great extent have a similar problem) is that all notifications/calls look equally important from the outside, so you have to stop doing what you're doing to check them because they might actually be stuff from the "Important and Urgent" quadrant, but unless you tightly manage it, most of them are not, not least because, if you push back on it hard the people who constantly work in the "Non-Important, Non-Urgent" quadrant (i.e. those who are bad at managing their own time) will make that your problem too.
So what do I do to manage it so that my phone is not a source of stress:
- Calls to my phone for work subjects outside work always (this is important) get a "I'll talk to you when I'm back at work". You have to inflexibly refuse to handle work stuff outside work otherwise the number of work calls will just creep up. Also do it from the very start of a new job: your work colleagues need to be trained to expect that from you and you need to provide them with an actual positive out (i.e. "I'll talk to you when I'm back at work" and actually do it). If an employer needs you to provided out of hours support, that has to be in the contract and there has to be a work phone just for that which will be ON during the hours contracted for that and OFF otherwise.
- Call to my phone for work subjects during work time get triaged and non-urgent or non-important stuff get's back a "I'm busy now, I'll talk to you about this when I have the time" if I indeed have something more important or urgent on the plate. Again, train your colleagues to expect that if they call you with non-urgent or non-important stuff there you will not be giving them that sweet feeling of having dumped the problem on somebody else - the objective here is not to "deny service", it's to as much as possible have other people do the triaging for you so that you're only interrupted by things which are worth it.
- E-mail is for non-urgent stuff: when I have the time I'll look into it. On my phone E-mail arrival notifications will be turned off. Again, work colleagues need to be trained by you to expect exactly that from you. Be organised yourself and have regular "check e-mail" times - this is part of getting other people do the triaging for you.
- All application notifications default to OFF. Very few ever get turned ON and if they abuse it they get turned OFF on the settings. The sending of a notification by an application is a choice of whomever is the maker of the app, hence follows their choices and generally serves their purposes, which means that most application notifications are in some way or another a marketing choice, either directly some kind of sales pitch or indirectly to "remind you of that app", which means they're most definitelly neither urgent nor important. Only a handfull of applications deserve to have notification enabled IMHO, and sometimes even some of those abuse that and stop deservings it.
TL;DR - Triage things so that you're as much as possible spend your time doing Important Non-Urgent things (You go after the non-urgent to reduce the number of things that through doing nothing about it whilst they're not urgent, go from potential problem into "Oh, shit everything is burning!"). Activelly segregate contact channels based on the triaged level of subjects. Train your colleagues from the start to expect just that (i.e. that e-mails don't promptly get responded) and always push back from the start against misuse of contact channels (i.e. non-urgent non-important stuff coming via phone gets a response along the lines of "I'm busy with more important stuff, so send me an e-mail about that and I'll look into it when I have the time"), so that essentially other people will be triaging that stuff for you before they even contact you. As for smartphone Apps, by default assume that notification sending is driven by Marketing considerations of the maker of that app and hence are neither important nor urgent (personally I default to notifications OFF for most apps).
