Delayed Messages on iOS
caleb.software
caleb.software
But I've thought about this a bit recently, and I don't think I should have to worry about bothering someone at 3 AM. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect other people to have do not disturb on / notifications off whenever they don't want to be disturbed.
And one cautionary tale about scheduling messages (email in particular): I once encountered a problem at 3AM and scheduled an 8AM text to tell someone about it, but they woke up at 6AM and immediately fixed it and were confused why I still had the problem two hours later (when my message arrived).
That's why do not disturb on / notifications off is on each of our phones. We control that. I don't expect other people to figure out the right timezone and sleep patterns I have.
That's... exactly what this is about. Now you _can_ help it.
Unless you have a really explicit understanding with the person you’re texting, they’re gonna assume you expect a response, or just expect them to read the message.
You gotta know how your actions will be received; “I can’t help you” really just isn’t enough if you wanna be a kind and thoughtful person, IMO.
Ober time, this distinction has blurred due to technology changes and resulting cultural adjustments including immediate email delivery, voicemail and advanced messaging and notification systems.
And that change over time is causing some disconnects between expectations of good behaviour.
It’s especially appalling when they played this trick on my old parents, who receive a slew of emails every morning at 5 or 6am.
Having separate devices for personnal and professional stuff helps. I can't speak about iOS, I used it way too long ago but both Android and most messaging platforms do not provide ways to have flexible do not disturb policies depending on multiple parameters such as sender/timeframe/app/format of message. It is usually a mix of the global do not disturb function for the OS, the global notification parameters per app and possibly some mute options on a contact/channel basis but that is not time range capable and only works on a blacklist instead of whitelist model.
Work-related messages during working hours, please.
Yes, it exists. Yes, no-one can notify the guy on duty because no-one can send him emails.
...is not a sentence that'd be said very often/ever.
No, if you don't want notifications outside your own personal work schedule, then it's up to you to manage them.
With the freedom of remote work and flexible schedules, comes the responsibility to manage your own notifications.
Check the table for all members.
Can I not post Slack messages to a group channel unless everyone is within their working hours?
Nope.
What about email? What if you're in a different locale temporarily for some reason?
Same.
> No, if you don't want notifications outside your own personal work schedule, then it's up to you to manage them.
Nope. Don't push your duties over other people. It's lazy. You should not message people outside working hours. As I said, it's common sense. Not so common, seems, seeing people like you, insisting on carelessly spam other people because they are too lazy to check a table.
And I repeat, it's even illegal in a bunch of first world countries to send anything, even an email outside of working hours.
So please, don't be that guy, respect other people's free time.
That catches all unexpected emergencies without bothering me too much due to emails, IRC messages, or a random text from a friend.
Is there a more proper way to use a phone?
1) there's this amazing tool that allows you to send a longform communication directly to one or many people where it will get stored and when they're starting their workday they'll see it. it's called e-mail. you should turn off notifications on your phone for e-mail... if a message is urgent, they can call or text.
2) you shouldn't obscure when you're working. creative people often prefer to work late, you should be honest about this so early morning expectations are relaxed. if you're typically a morning person and up on a production issue you should not be expected to be in first thing the next day after staying up late to fix it.
3) all this delayed fake timestamp messaging just contributes to a toxic culture of everybody appearing to be working all the time.
Second, there is nothing toxic about scheduling a text. My father is one of the people who never silences his phone, so when he gets a text or call at night he always wakes up. He gets annoyed if it's not urgent, so a scheduled text message in the morning would make him much happier. Scheduling a text message is all about convenience for the recipient of the message and comes out of a desire to be respectful of the other person's time.
Other than drunk friends and booty calls someone had better be in the hospital or dead if they wake me up in the middle of the night.
You can tell Android and iOS to make noise when someone calls a 2nd time.
And I’m pretty sure you’re only entitled to one phone call…
Didn't you just argue everyone shouldn't mute their phones?
> And I’m pretty sure you’re only entitled to one phone call…
You're thinking of a plot device probably.[1]
Mute your phone, don’t mute your phone, doesn’t matter to me. Just don’t wake me up at 3am for petty stuff is all I ask.
I also believe the two call thing let’s anyone through even if you have it where only saved contacts can ring the phone. Maybe, I’d just have it where it would only ring for contacts because I never get calls from random numbers that I ever wanted to talk to other than when I was at work and trying to get people in the cab who would often miss my call and immediately call back so I wouldn’t take off without them.
With your father, texts are synchronous comms, possibly without requiring an explicit acknowledgement. This may be different for different groups of people. Define what that agreed protocol is and it removes the ambiguity.
perfect. beautiful. AMAZING!
the smtp crypto situation is a mess, sure, but work emails usually all stay on the same machine or hosting provider anyway. more importantly, it comes from an era before zomg smartphone notifications now now now and as such has respectful communications properties built-in.
> Second, there is nothing toxic about scheduling a text. My father is one of the people who never silences his phone, so when he gets a text or call at night he always wakes up. He gets annoyed if it's not urgent, so a scheduled text message in the morning would make him much happier.
personal matters are just that and i was referring to work stuff mostly.... buuuuut that said...
you should try sending him an e-mail! even if you schedule your text for when he's awake, you're still sending him a demanding interrupt! old people love their e-mails they sit in their big comfy chairs and read them at their leisure with their favorite glasses on with their nice big lamps! he probably will appreciate that even more! if it's urgent and he hasn't responded, THEN you can send an interrupt by giving him a call or sending a text.
instead you're instructing robots to steal your dad's attention at some predetermined time in the future while you do something else... do you see the dystopic themes here?
Gmail on iOS certainly will try to notify you for “important” messages. If anything, I think the failure of email in combatting spam is the only thing saving us from the notification-heavy defaults you mentioned.
> instead you're instructing robots to steal your dad's attention at some predetermined time in the future while you do something else... do you see the dystopic themes here?
Not that different from setting a reminder to send the text yourself…and you’d presumably pick a scheduled send time when you’re also available to reply. But I do agree, it’s marginally more impersonal.
Well… I often don’t check my email till after lunch or later. This has never been a problem since anybody who needs an answer to something in less than 24 hours uses slack or text messaging.
If I'm on a work computer/device/profile I don't mind seeing work-related items. Even better if its clear when action is needed.
As many companies become more diverse in working times, trusting individuals to manage it seems like one option while the other is would be patterned off the French "Right to disconnect"
Being courteous means trying to think on behalf of the other person.
However, as we interact with ever increasing numbers of individuals with an ever increasing variety of backgrounds and personal circumstance, it’s increasingly impossible to think on behalf of everyone we interact with.
And therefore it makes sense that we all need to design and configure mechanisms, that allow us to interact while keeping stress levels somewhat manageable.
Context would really depend on my response to asynchronous messages piling up.
I'm very direct about this with new hires.
"I'm awake and work weird hours. Please don't take a message from me outside your normal hours to mean I want or need an immediate response unless the message is directly talking about a production outage in which case i'll be explicit about that. If you're around and you want to spend a few hours debating the merits of embedding a lua interpreter into a data processing pipeline vs trying to figure out how to droplessly reload golang code great, if not, we can pick it up the next time we're both around.
On the same note, please don't not message me because it's late where you think I am at the moment and please don't not let me know about something because 'it's normal US hours, he probably already knows.'
Please also don't take offense if I don't respond immediately, despite appearances, I do sometimes actually sleep."
Setting the actual expectations works great. Some people respond simply by saying that they won't put slack on their phone, or will turn notifications for slack off and I'm fine with that (having their number to call for actual emergencies).
I think the problem arises not from the direct actions here (messaging someone at 3am) but by the implicit expectation of a reply. I think some people don't realize what they're doing but I think a lot do and they want to create that implicit must-reply-24-7 nature.
But if I was working for you I would not like this part:
> unless the message is directly talking about a production outage in which case i'll be explicit about that
because that means I have to keep notifications on and triage them even though the whole point is "I'm not going to respond outside work hours when my notifications are off / dnd is on."
It really depends on the scale of the business. In some large ones, there is always a person working to handle “must be fixed now” problems. If you are off shift, then it is the person on shift’s task.
In smaller operations with 24 hour operation, and infrequent “must be fixed now” problems, there will be workers whose job includes being on call. Sometimes the on call duty rotates, sometimes it does not.
So if you are from a land of large companies, it may seem insane for your employer to ask something of you outside your shift. Likewise, when you are a little guy scrambling to grow, getting out of bed once in a while and handling a problem to preserve that growth is your best option.
In the situation in this post, I would hope that the critical “get up and fix this” messages come through a different system, or have a way to cut through a “do not disturb” so the employees can mute the mundane messages.
It sounds like you are in the first group. My company didn’t staff 24 hours, but used to pay people extra when they were the “get up and handle this” person. The size of the pay, and the frequency of the events was tuned so there was always a willing pool of people queueing to be the pager carrier.
When they were the person on-call, or only when they actually responded to an outage? Unless outages are really that infrequent, it pays to set clear boundaries on when and who is supposed to be available for an outage, and the cost of a dedicated solution like Pagerduty (or Grafana OnCall) is negligible.
I imagine it’s possible but that seems like a terrible idea. Making the compensation for being on-call obvious seems better for everyone involved. At least the one who might have to get up on Christmas know exactly what they are getting out of it and that no one is taking advantage of them in the rotation.
If PagerDuty goes "ding" at 3am, it's probably best to take a look.
If Slack goes "ding" at 3am, maybe you forgot to turn off notifications or something, but by no means do you need to even read the notification.
Nope. Read the whole comment, i address that :)
Some people said "fine, then I'm turning off notifications" and I'm fine with that, if I have an alternate method of contact for the (very rare) production outages.
My approach to many of these things is a direct result of me doing it very badly at some point and having to deal with the consequences of it.
I had this dynamic at my last gig with very pushy users, spamming of @here/@channel, and a boss working weird hours. I found no solution other than disabling all notifications for slack.
Still, when I would wake up & quickly scan through slack to make sure there were no open fires to login & help with, I would invariably have to dig through commingled fires & "just sending this now cuz I'm online" threads.
My next solution became that I just stopped even checking slack at all in the morning until I was either in-office, or ready to login while remote. Otherwise I found myself stewing about some annoying but non-urgent messages that I had exposed myself to.
Most people would prefer to get 1 properly thought out email than to wake up to a series of 5-10 slack messages or slack wall of text.
If I want to go back to an email, I can leave the individual message unread. A slack message I end up with a red dot next to my bosses name for an unread message (and obscures any more messages that have come since) OR use the "remind me" feature to them get a red dot popping up next to my bosses name in an hour to make me jump thinking my boss has some new urgent thing to ask me.
We've invented a pretty good async non-urgent message medium, and yet forgotten how to use it. I think all of these super clever DM strategies are self defeating.
Keep in mind my workflow is much more likely to result in you ending up in a new task focused group or with a new message in a group vs a 1:1 DM.
Also, 'just turn off notifications' isn't a solution. Having to ignore messages from your superior puts people in a very uncomfortable position.
Granted I know very little about you other than the tiny bits of information gathered in this post, so take it with a grain of salt, but I've worked with people exhibiting similar attitudes and it is extremely toxic.
"just ignore your boss" is usually considered a CLM (Career Limiting Move)
I end up in 50 different channels, 30 different DM groups and 20 1:1 DMs over the course of a week. Some conversations span 5 different channels/DMs as people are added/removed.. Outlook would just have one nice threaded email on the subject. Slack I end up with 5 little red dots on my channel browser pane.. it's a mess.
I've now had to institute a policy for myself on escalations that is - if it doesn't come through PagerDuty, it's not an incident or urgent. This in theory, by official policy is correct. In practice, this is like a union slowing down the trains..
A huge huge problem with slack versus email is out-of-office behaviors. In outlook, I set myself OOO in calendar, create a scheduled OOO response with active dates and audience types to respond / not respond to (internal/external). It's like 3 clicks, and defaults to the same message I always use, and I have to set myself OOO in calendar already anyway so people don't book meetings / my boss knows I am out.
In Slack, I mark myself away, set my status to OOO, put a stupid little palm try icon up, disable notifications and...
AND I still get people blasting me with DMs as if I am working. I come back to a mess of unreads I need a couple hours to unwind as I scroll up channels/DMs/etc. Users can even force notifications through against my will (except that I disabled them at OS level :-) ).
Slack needs an OOO response tool, and even the ability to block senders to go a step further.
The problem with slack is it only takes 1 bad user in the organization and it becomes hell.
My org has both app devs & app users within slack. Users can spam channels and DM devs when they figure out who the useful idiots are. The "notify anyway" button gets used, frequently.
The idea that they expose this button to the sender is toxic.
Surely you can resolve this by talking to the person, then their manager?
If it still doesn't resolve it, mute them and advise you've done so due to abuse of notifications, and their issues will always be looked at when you're next looking.
> Please don't take a message from me outside your normal hours to mean I want or need an immediate response unless the message is directly talking about a production outage in which case i'll be explicit about that.
This still means they need to wake up everytime a message is received. There are likely other mechanisms for waking them during an outage, but the pressure it still there that it could be related to an outage that did not page them specially.
Similarly, getting a message while you are at a BBQ, family event, or bar will make you start thinking about the problem right away. Potentially removing their mind from the moment they are currently in.
> If you're around and you want to spend a few hours debating the merits of embedding a lua interpreter into a data processing pipeline vs trying to figure out how to droplessly reload golang code great, if not, we can pick it up the next time we're both around.
You may be saying this honestly, but many people, especially junior new hires will feel pressure none the less. They really to make good impressions and impress people.
Agreed if urgent messages are going through the same channel as non-urgent. Otherwise, message sent doesn’t necessarily imply message received, and I reckon it makes more sense to encourage people to turn off work notifications out of hours.
> Setting the actual expectations works great. Some people respond simply by saying that they won't put slack on their phone, or will turn notifications for slack off and I'm fine with that (having their number to call for actual emergencies).
I delay all messages I send (even emails) so they appear in business hours. Slack and Outlook both support this and I suspect other tools too. The only real downside is that sometimes things evolve and then you have an incorrect or out of context / misleading message popping up ("It seems like the production database is down" popping up 8 hours after it was resolved etc).
This makes sense in a world where vendors have perfected notifications. IMO, notifications are still a cluster^*&k. This is why they are still very much a moving target for ios.
I don't enable do not disturb for people who think that way. I just block them. If you are rude and entitled enough to decide you can disturb me any time you like, I'll ensure you can't.
3am calls/texts are fine for friends/family with an emergency. I will not let you put them at risk because I needed to dnd my phone because you choose to be a jerk.
At my company, they are very strict about “just because you message somebody on slack doesn’t mean they have to respond immediately.”
The corollary is “if you don’t set yourself as away or indicate you’re on PTO, as long as it isn’t wildly outside of work hours I expect a response.”
So I have no problem sending somebody a message at 10 AM on a Saturday. Because I know that everybody at the company generally has everything flipped off. Even if they get a notification, my assumption is that they will go “oh I forgot to turn that off,” flick it off, and promptly respond to me on Monday.
Like most of these things, the devil is in the details. And if you don’t make the rules clear from the get-go, then it can be ripe for abuse and situations like you being bothered by people in the middle of the night arise.
I choose to use default-allow, and block people I consider rude and/or abusive.
I want my partner/friends/family to reliably be able to emergency call me from a payphone or borrowed phone, more than I want to pander to cow orkers with vestigial social skills.
That said though, this is a fantastic work around, I love seeing clever uses of tools to make them do things their creators (probably) didn't necessarily intend.
siri supports this. i mainly use it when cooking and need multiple timers.
Edit: it seems there exists an app for that[1]. Gonna try it tomorrow.
[1]: <https://apps.apple.com/us/app/easy-cooking-timer/id492224774>
If I start something on my watch or HomePod why can’t I check in on it on my phone?
Why do I need a set of independent timers for ever Apple device I own?
There's a sibling comment that mentions HomeKit timers. I'd bet those are living on some remote machine and you're only able to check them but they behave very differently from local timers.
As a sibling commenter said, this isn't about millisecond precision, but making sure the timer telling me to take the cake out of the oven I set on the tablet in the kitchen will ring on my phone.
But I doubt that's necessary. How much do you think the clocks on computers drift between syncs? I would wager if I isolated my laptop and phone from any networks, they'd continue to show the same time for quite a while.
At first glance this seems like a perfect match for e-mail instead of iMessage or SMS.
From least to most urgent: Postcard E-Mail Slack iMessage SMS Call
Just send an email?
If it doesn’t require an immediate response, use email.
Also if it’s iPhone to iPhone you likely won’t interrupt the other user since they would/should have night mode on anyway.
E-mail is way to go in this situation.
Also, sender will be unavailable to reply for additional info, while appearing to be online.
Admittedly this is still a bit hacky, but good to see that it's possible.
[0]: https://datajar.app/
But this is a fantastic shortcut to get around the limitation.
Apple usually trots out "privacy" or "security" when people find their software lacking in terms of usability or convenience but I can't understand why this would be an issue for them.
I'll admit I've never scheduled a message for later, other than on Twitter since I've lived in some awkward time zones relative to the bulk of my mutuals. But I can't come up with a reason why Apple wouldn't want to add it.
One thing I really appreciate about Apple Messages is just how well it works, and how little spam ever makes it in. I think the reliability of Messages is almost taken for granted… I wouldn’t want to give that reliability promise up for this sort of feature!
Is there a way to have the timestamp part be unencrypted and the message be encrypted or does that violate end to end policy?
Though I like being able to cancel/edit until the send deadline so from my perspective it's best to keep on the sender device as long as possible and send only at the last possible second.
Should they (I asked to send) or not (‘sending’ device offline)?
Sender sends it encrypted with a flag to not display until X time, phone receives it whenever, and then displays it at X time because it’s just been sitting there.
If not they may expect me to start responding when I may be unavailable.
What happens to read status (when on)? I haven’t read your last X messages but I did send one to you? That’s off.
Can it be canceled?
How does this interact with the new function in iOS 16 letting you edit and delete after send?
Can I schedule send on my iPhone but edit before send on my iPad?
What if I schedule send and lose network. Then I edit on both my iPhone and iPad to show different things but they’re both off network. Not they both come back. What gets sent?
What if the ‘wrong one’ comes back first?
Does it work with SMS?
Lots of weird complications to think about.
Long press the message to get a context menu: edit, delete, reschedule, send now.
As for sync and all that, whatever algorithm they use for Notes is fine with me. I would expect the message itself to be living in iCloud until it's sent, so most of the questions about losing network connectivity or not having battery life wouldn't apply. So no, no SMS: support for SMS in Messages is an afterthought and I would in fact prefer two different apps, although I might be the only one who feels that way.
- In the notification: yes. In the chat view: no. I don't know why it matters, though. If you expect an immediate response, you should probably use a more asynchronous communication method (many email platforms can hold messages for you). That doesn't seem like a reason to not make the feature available, though.
- That's a possible state regardless, unless the client must always have a full database of all received messages before new messages come in; most messaging apps seem to support a "fragmented" read state and I doubt iOS's messenger doesn't.
- Yes
- I don't see the problem here. Replace the message in the queue using an account+message identifier/cryptographic signature/magical pixie dust.
- Yes
- If the message is sent by the server at the scheduled time, this isn't a problem. If you rely on individual devices (Google's implementation), you may end up sending a duplicate. I doubt this'll happen that often in practice.
- Depends on the implementation; the server will probably keep the "correct" version to send.
- Probably not? There are tons of features that don't work with SMS though. I haven't used SMS for years, but Google's Messages app has delayed messages and a web client, so this seems like a solved enough problem for those still using SMS.
Several chat apps, including SMS apps, have this feature already. E2EE adds a layer of complexity but even that can be fixed with existing technology.
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Since the contacts app syncs with the birthday calendar, it’s easy enough to map names to phone numbers.
sleep 7200 ; sms …
If I drop my phone in the river I can still send sms from my own phone number.
Not “blue” bubble though…
Instead of manually typing out and sending a response to everybody. Now I can just setup this automation and it will send out my reminder every month. That's 6-7 minutes I save every month just for this use case.
I ended up configuring the shortcut to use the location field rather than title field. So at least my calendar won't look odd.
Still works as expected. I wasn't entirely sure how to format the text field so it would pick up the phone numbers (in case of group messages). So I just went with my gut and used a space separator for each distinct number and typed the fully qualified number (ie, +1YYYXXXZZZZ)
I used it last month to wish someone happy birthday.
it's common for creative individual contributors to work late and often those kinds of people do their best work late. i'd argue that the way it can become unhealthy is when rigid early work hours lead to sleep deprivation which can damage performance, well-being and overall stability.