Comment by Fr0styMatt88 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Fr0styMatt88 | Hacker News Reader

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This is something I've been personally trying to get better at. As someone who did a lot of instant messaging in the 90s (think ICQ and IRC) I would think nothing of shooting off texts to people whenever I felt like it via SMS. There was never an expectation of immediately being answered back then and I always thought of messaging as 'write it while you remember and don't expect a response until whenever'. If something was truly urgent I'd call.

Except that's not how other people would perceive it. I've since learned that it can be incredibly annoying to others, to the point where some people would actually get distressed thinking they would have to answer the texts. Couple that with a bad habit of sending many short texts (it's how you'd write on messaging in the old days) and you have one REALLY REALLY ANNOYING FRIEND (regrettably I was that annoying friend).

So I guess I just want to apologize profusely from the other side of the fence. I'm trying to be much more mindful these days about whether that chit-chat message REALLY needs to be sent RIGHT NOW, or can it just wait for a conversation at a later time?

I'm trying to be much more self-aware in this regard.

I find it helpful to actively (and when I first introduce myself) online is to also have a disclaimer on how I communicate and to let me know if I need to change my patterns to accommodate someone. This information up front (and regular reminders about my lack of offense at not being responded to immediately) is often extremely reassuring to others rather than a source of anxiety. Because now I’ve ensured we’re all on the same page.

In my view, if people are getting annoyed you're texting them, it's on them. They're the ones assuming you expect an immediate response, unless you're complaining about it. If you're getting annoyed about them not replying, that's on you.

I think for many people, especially parents, they feel an obligation to at least read texts immediately to see if some action is required, and for whatever reason they are not up to the task of setting up different notifications for their kids and spouse.

In my circles text is generally for when you want to get the message to someone right away, and email is for when they should read at their convenience.

> text is generally for when you want to get the message to someone right away, and email is for when they should read at their convenience

I wish messaging apps gave the sender the ability to hint at urgency, like the priority header that some email clients support, and then the recipient would be able to use that (or choose to ignore it) instead of the relatively rudimentary controls typically available today.

A recipient can put their whole phone silent mode, vibrate mode, or ringtone mode; use DND mode, perhaps with a schedule, perhaps with exceptions for contacts; specify a ringtone per contact; mute specific group messages -- all of these have one thing in common, which is that if the sender has something unusually important or unusually unimportant to say, they're stuck with generating whatever type of notification the recipient already decided is appropriate for a typical message from that sender.

Using phone calls for higher urgency and email for lower urgency is usually good enough, but achieving that same effect in-band through a messaging app for continuity of history would be even better.

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