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Comment by DougMellon | Hacker News Reader

I have progressed to a point where I essentially have do not disturb on all day with my partner and mother allowed through as well as two apps for work and the rest receiving a DND response. I also have it set so repeated calls come though from my favorites in the case of an emergency.

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I to do this. phone permanent DNB. Even during working hours, although then its in eye shot to the side of my monitor. So i can see stuff there, but can choose whether to answer or not. Its been immense in combating the constant 24x7 messages i get from work. Its been pretty useful as well in just telling people drop your message to my teams, it won't wake me up and i'll get to it when i get a chance. Only a few limited number of people on my favourites (which bypasses this)

I do the exact same thing. DnD is permanently on and I allow "favorite" contacts to come through as well as one or two apps.

My phone almost never vibrates or makes sound.

My social circle is quite small so I could see how this may not work for everyone.

I think I could get the same behavior without DnD but it'd require a lot of fiddling to make sure every app/contact has the right notification settings and frankly that's too much busywork.

I do the exact same thing. The only drawbacks are that I occasionally miss calls that I would have wanted to answer. Here's an example why this became necessary. I was recently looking to pre-qualify for a mortgage, now I'm getting 6-8 calls a day at various hours and even multiple unsolicited texts. It's amazing how awful using a phone has become and incredibly distracting.

I only use DND at night. Throughout the day, my strategy is to mute notifications from e everyone on Whatsapp except family. If I start a conversation with someone, I turn their notification on temporarily. I also have a whatsapp widget on my home screen where I can quickly glance for new messages.

Yes, I spend the whole day turning notifications on and off for people but I am very happy with my system.

I do this but specifically for managing call spam. I let messaging through though. Do you ever make mistakes like missing food delivery calls? I haven't found a great solution besides trying to remember to disable DND for those. Maybe I need to give them a dedicated voip number that always punches through, but I think even that could get call spam.

I highly recommend Google Voice or similar VOIP for all commercial services. That may help reduce spam to your mobile and Google Voice has filtering of spam built in (unsure of quality).

Why does delivery use sms instead of proper app notifications?

I'm talking about calls, not sms. Like if I order a pizza without using an app so the restaurant doesn't have to give a huge cut away to an app.

I do the same. iOS 15 introduced Focus, which extends the DND functionality to an arbitrary number of configurable “focus” profiles. Each profile may have its own schedule and exclusions by app and contact. It’s fantastic.

Are you fully satisfied with your setup or are there gaps?

I am. However, there are times where I feel a slight guilt not responding right away and I still catch myself reaching for my phone thinking there has to be some notifications to check.

I am also. iPhone and Slack give me the tools to suppress the noise, but still catch the signal.

If I could ask for one thing, it’d be an easier way to toggle Silence Unknown Callers (which is in the anti-spam category, not quite what the article is focused on).

I’m old enough to have been a heavy AIM user back in the day. I don’t want to toggle on/off my “readiness for chat”, nor do I want to consider my recipient’s readiness for chat (aside from time of day sensitivity). I prefer today’s tools that put the onus on the recipient to configure their notifications suitably (hint: if in doubt, just turn the notifications off, and poll manually on an appropriate longish interval). If a human complains about your slowness to respond, that’s a social norms problem, not a problem with the tools.

iOS now has scheduled notification summaries that you can receive at specific times, while allowing critical notifications to appear immediately

Oh wow, I did not know - thank you.

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