Yes I Saw Your Text, but Don’t Expect Me to Respond Instantly
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- Privacy/InfoSec - Forgetting to change status - Meaningless status states (Away was never really that accurate or meaningful) - Extra messaging friction
I've found that it's usually just a few certain types that expect instant replies. It doesn't require too much time for them to get that I respond when I can. The same rules do apply to everyone, but I'll deliberately delay responses at times so as not to feed the expectation of the reply-needy. With email, I have set times to review and reply.
Also, I work I higher education, where things move slowly. Although we don't have an assumption that after-hours emails will be replied to until the next business day, any delay of a day or more can cascade to far more delay on the other end(s).
I've been "on call" for a while before, and part of the solution is to deal directly with that. Anything app that thinks it has the right to pop up notifications whenever the hell it feels like it (and why is "3am" so often when they feel like it?) better have a setting to undo that easily found, or they're in for a rude uninstalling. Anything else that thinks it gets the priority interrupt had better be prepared to discover it doesn't.
Because I need to save that priority interrupt for the actually important "site down" notice. I was getting a visceral twitch whenever I got a text because having the same alert for "CARTHAGE IS BURNING PREPARE TO SPEND HOURS FIXING IT YES I KNOW IT'S 2AM" and "hey whats up dude" was not working for me.
I'm not on that call anymore, but I've kept the habit of keeping everything away from that level of interrupt. If it's that important, pick up the phone and call me. Provide social proof of its importance by putting your own attention into the conversation. (Which, of course, can only be done by a real human.) Otherwise, you're not that important and you can deal with a delay.
For me it is fairly simple - usually texts in my company are higher urgency, location agnostic, communication. Only reason I would text is I need someone sooner than they see an email/Lync message, but I don't need them urgent enough to interrupt with a call. "I'm running late from this meeting, can we delay?", "you ok for lunch in 5?" etc. people typically respect that rough, unexpressed, protocol.
However, this is a topic I'm very interested in because my fiancee is the first person I've ever met that does not reply back soon to a text message and hardly picks up her phone.
When we first started dating, this was a little strange. She would sometimes reply back within minutes. Other times she would take up to two hours. I couldn't gauge her interest in me.
It turns out due to her age and culture (non-Western), she just simply does not use her phone that much. So she isn't looking at it a lot.
We've argued that there must be a middle ground, though, and this is where it gets interesting.
This isn't really a technology problem. It is a philosophical one.
When we deal with people everyday, there is an unwritten and unspoken social contract we agree on. The case for not replying immediately to a stranger or an acquaintance is easily accepted, I believe. As the article says, you may be driving, you may be in another phone call, busy reading or studying. A stranger or acquaintance takes a longer time to sit higher up in your priority list. This is a basic socialization rule. I accept these things easily, and what's more, I act according to this concept. I basically categorise people's importance in my world. Even if I've read the text message, seen the missed phone call, or read the email. These categories are key, I believe.
However, when a loved one, your significant other, spouse, fiancee or fiance, messages you or phones you or emails you, it is a totally different ball game, in my view. Emergency purposes, communicating your whereabouts sooner makes cohabitation much easier, especially when planning your day, unexpected plans, people know your schedule/routine and any changes may cause grief to your loved ones, etc.
I do feel like family whom you do not live with is considered a step down in the priority list, but those you live with, specifically a partner, is different. And feeling insulted when they don't respond within 30 minutes at most generally, is pretty natural.
"Do you want me to buy X or Y beer?" "Do we have soccer tonight?" "Do I need to come home early?", "what were the days of our planned vacation?"
Almost all of those are non-important questions. Not an emergency. However, in each case, I'm blocked from further action (or risk angering her when I buy the wrong things, come home late). It's frustrating to be standing at the grocery store, give up after two minutes, and then get a text when you're in line that X >> Y.
This is, frankly, one reason I really prefer using Facebook Messenger -- it's easy to send a thumbs-up response if I don't feel like typing, and I can respond easily on my computer rather than having to pick up my phone.
Their use habits have nothing to do with your relationship.
Demanding that someone change gets ugly quick, especially when you single them out as a unique case. Why don't those standards apply to everyone else?
Be honest about the role of fear in your rationalization. Sounds like there's a lot you can learn about living a more balanced life from this person. Unexpected events will always happen, technology won't change that, and blaming their occurrence (partially or totally) on a lack of communication is just not right.
My significant other and I are a lot alike. We've happily accepted what it takes to live with another person, as two people who were used to doing stuff on their own and living alone. She doesn't speak English well, and learning her language has been fascinating!
Thankfully, we are the happiest we've ever been. I think knowing someone who is from a totally different culture from you puts things in perspective and the dynamic is totally different from being with someone from your own culture.
We often read things in Western publications, and laugh and say, "Wow, this is so American/Canadian/Western". It's funny how everything we read in English totally never even considers that there might be another "normal". Even in scientific publications.
With regard to those standards applying to everyone, sorry, I'm not Christian and don't believe we should love everyone and give everyone our undivided attention. This, of course, is an ideological difference. My time is important. However, if I do choose to give you my undivided attention, I will listen to you very carefully.
Hope you're doing well.
My point being: it's irrelevant wether someone is "Western", Christian or otherwise; all that is important is their desire. Language is often inadequate for expressing these motivations (even moreso when there is a barrier). Respect others as capable, intelligent humans who have experienced just as much circumstance as you, and allow them to make their own decisions.
Their conclusions will likely be different from your own, but that shouldn't be offensive. Everyone is unique.
Yep. My cell phone is for my convenience not anyone else's (except my spouse). They're not paying my bill. For all intents and purposes people should think of my cell phone as a land line, assume it is plugged in charging next to my bed. Also, if I'm eating a meal, entertaining/have guests, not in the mood, I will not answer your call or immediately reply to your text messages.
Now, if you're my spouse, I expect more timely responses if you are aware of an attempt to communicate (text message, missed call, incoming call) but try to understand that they may be busy or unable to get back to me right away.
> but those you live with, specifically a partner, is different. And feeling insulted when they don't respond within 30 minutes at most generally, is pretty natural.
I agree. That's my biggest irritation. If I get done with work and try to get a hold of my wife but can't. If I get home and she and the children are not there my blood boils. We have come to an agreement. If she leaves the house or will be away from her phone for a period (in the pool), especially around when I get done with work, that she will send me a text message letting me know. This helps greatly.
You have to understand that the other person might have taken time out of his/her busy schedule to have a chat with you. And when you not busy but just don't feel like responding, it's reasonable for them to feel offended as admit it, no one likes to have a quick conversation when every response is after half an hour.
The easiest, non-offensive way to do that would just to drop a quick message telling them that you'd get back to them (when you are able to give a few minutes of undivided attention to them). That's all, and no one should mind it then. But if you never feel like having any realtime conversation with anyone at all, then may be there are communication issues :).
I think it's important to acknowledge that, while technology mimics physical life in a lot of ways, it does not replicate it. The medium of conversation matters and should be considered. For example, no I wouldn't stare at their face until I felt like answering it, but I also wouldn't say, "Dear John, thank you for your question.." as I would only do that in an email. Likewise, I wouldn't speak out loud a lot of common phrases I use in texts, because having a conversation through the medium of a phone is psychologically different than in-person, and I think that's the issue I was getting at. While texting, you have to be more cautious about word choice and sentence structure so that you can convey not only the message, but the tone as well, which will naturally come out in-person. 200 years ago, all instant communication was done in person. This is a relatively new field of psychology that hasn't seem to be explored due to the fact that, especially texting, is an extremely new form of communication.
I actually never feel the urge to respond quickly to a text message. I treat it as the asynchronous platform that it is. Phone calls on the other hand are way more intrusive than text messages and I hardly ever answer any call because of it.
... which is an infuriating habit and a huge impediment to work.
E.g., Your job has run away with our timeshare. Your email program is closed, you aren't signed onto IM, and you blithely ignore your ringing phone. I have to file a service ticket, summon support from ten timezones away, and it gets killed in a half hour. Or if you picked up the phone, you could have killed it in ten seconds.
E.g., We are having a discussion about a critical decision. We wage email wars back and forth for days, each getting more disturbed that the other is completely misunderstanding some key point. Or if you picked up the phone, we might have easily sidestepped the miscommunication and reached an immediate understanding instead.
If nothing else, a voice on the phone humanizes you more than Times New Roman 12pt, which reminds people they are working with other humans- and that in itself can nip issues in the bud.
Calling me is literally ringing a bell and demanding I speak to you this instant. If you ring this bell for something that doesn't actually need my immediate attention then you don't respect my time and I won't give it to you.
I give others this respect, I almost never call anyone unless it's an emergency, and if I want to speak to someone I wait until it looks like they're not occupied. To me this seems like respect, but I'm open to the possibility that I have communication issues.
So I drew a line in the sand and explained to him that those things needed to go to email, so that I could deal with them at an appropriate time and not worry about losing them. This seemed to work well at first, but then every email was immediately followed by an SMS: did you get my email? The first few times, I interpreted that as "I sent an email a few days ago and didn't hear back" so I'd frantically go check my email and see the message: sent 2 minutes ago.
I don't miss that client. Eventually the solution was to ignore him on SMS entirely. Well... Eventually the solution was to fire him as a client, but that was for other reasons.
Approximately zero.
We bill $120 hourly. If the client CC the whole team on a problem, the whole team is going to take time off their current work to read the email. (5 mins * 6 workers) They are then going to reply to the message (2 mins * 6) and then investigate (10 mins * 6). A manager is likely going to step in and manage the team (30 mins). Finally, one developper is going to fix the issue (1 hour) and all the other developers are going to require getting back in "the zone" (average of 11 mins *6).
That's three hours (or $360) wasted for an email that should have been properly sent to the product manager or to the support team. If the client do this every week and nobody notice it and educate him, he is going to waste thousands a month of the project's budget.
We pride ourselves on how close to the client we are. If there is an emergency, they can email the team 24/7 and they will get a response. That doesn't come for free. If the client abuse of it, so be it, but they better be able to pay the bill at the end.
I commented on the ridiculousness of someone complaining about a couple of developers losing 2 minutes of productivity.
You're commenting on a problem client wasting hours of peoples times, at a company that apparently has no internal system to manage issues.
Judging by the down votes I got, everyone thinks the same as you. Ah well.
Still, disturbing a developper will set him back 10 to 20 mins depending on the individual and the study you choose to believe in.
And what if that style of chatting and communication is the cultural norm, and such interruptions happen every few minutes, all day long?
https://i.imgur.com/3uyRWGJ.jpg
A 10 second interruption is enough for me to lose 10 minutes of my time. Have twenty 10 second interruptions in the day and I've lost over 3 hours of productive time. Interrupt an entire team who potentially lose 10 minutes for that 10 second interruption and across a team of 10 people you've potentially lost 30 hours of productive time.
Less meaningless distractions is better.
Would you enjoy a book if I interrupted you every 3rd page for 15 seconds?
Yes, interruptions are exactly that - interruptions. No, a 2 second message accidentally sent to the entire team should not be the end of the world.
It was quite fun seeing OC completely wipe out, but much more fun getting answers.
Even as connections were being wiped out due to latency, as being asked to hijack desks that still had connection. Some really insightful stuff that was irrelevant for anything 'in hand' but yet relevant, and that didn't usually come back through formal channels.
But, absolute OC wipe-out.
Some answers that came back were quite embarrassing, for all. It led to good things.
Everyone who knows me knows that I do this and I have told them that I am not going to change. For emergencies, they know the people I usually see each day and know to call one of them.
I've discovered that when people can't expect to contact you on a whim at any time, they think ahead and let you know what their plans are in advance. Both parties can then arrange their availability in advance and use their time more efficiently.
After a year of doing this it makes you realize just how absurd and artificial the expectation of continuous availability is. My attention is a resource and I am going to control how I allocate it, not others.
I have some people who will always respond to my texts immediately, and some people who I will be lucky if I hear back in an hour.
I don't hold any ill will towards the second group of people. I come to expect that from them.
The only time I might get agitated is if someone always responds immediately and then stops, just because it's violating my expectations.
I wonder if this person were to stop compulsively responding to texts immediately if people would stop getting angry when he doesn't.
Writing the specs takes about 1-5 minutes and allows the developer to have a clear path to work from.
The trick is to never respond immediately on media that you don't want it expected from. It has the random reinforcement effect attached to it, so if they get you once, they'll always expect it.
I didn't like talking on the phone much but texting is so much worse in so many ways.
> So many things that would be easy to say out loud are
> not worth typing on a phone screen.
This was (naively) my first iOS app attempt before I realized this is something that has to be done at the OS level. Please, Apple, "Do Not Disturb" was a step in the right direction. Finish the job.
Ultimately, however, I find myself gradually mimicking the behavior of my contacts. If you always take your time to get back to me, then I won't see you as a priority and if we are 'friends' or 'romantic partners' then the relationship will gradually erode due to this. However, if you get back to me in a timely manner, you are always on time for appointments and you always let me know beforehand that you are not going to keep an appointment then I will put more effort than I would otherwise into trying to maintain the relationship.
This also applies to driving. It would be unsafe to type a response, but reading a message in my opinion is fine. Similar to glacing at a GPS.
As a cyclist and a former driver, neither is acceptable.