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Comment by atleta | Hacker News Reader

I've silenced my phone 8 or 9 years ago and it's been like that since then. (With unmuting it very occasionally. Like a few times a year, maybe.) The notification frequency must have grown a lot since then.

I have no idea how people can deal with their phone beeping and vibrating constantly. Actually, I get annoyed pretty quickly when e.g. my partner leaves her phone in the room.

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I've been doing the same thing for a few months now. At first I had it set up to shut up after 6 pm, but these days it's just completely silent. I check it every so often, on my own terms, because there are some things that I do want to engage with—a call or a text message, for example.

Still, I've had to push back against the expectation of being available 24/7 and responding immediately to everything. A text that goes unanswered for a few minutes becomes a phone call or three, to ask why I'm not responding. It's bloody exhausting sometimes.

As for me, people have learnt that they can't reach me most of the time instantly. You don't have to answer the phone calls either. You can say later that you didn't see it and your phone was muted (which is true). People get used to it pretty quickly. I guess, for most people it's just a few family members or other very close relations anyway. Romantic partners are the worst, of course, in this regard. One has to be smart to set the expectations at the very beginning. (I guess it can be done later too, though.)

I have had my smartphone on vibrate-only since pretty much the beginning of having a smartphone, as I find it much less distracting than audio notifications, and much easier to ignore. I have almost all notifications turned off, except for calls and texts, and notifications from my security system. It's that last thing that prevents me from being able to leave my phone out of sight all the time.

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