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Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

If you have something that urgent it's better to preemptively turn it off. Yeah yeah, easier said than done, but as a habitual Do Not Disturb user, this has worked well for me.

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What's the connection to Do Not Disturb? I still haven't explored that functionality fully, and it seems Apple has built it out significantly. I suspect I could benefit by using it better to establish a "at work mode" and a "at home mode", in addition to my current simple usage of "you sure as hell better not wake me up at 3 AM with a notification".

I do "Do Not Disturb" 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. No calls, no texts, no notifications, no nothing. Yes, Apple has indeed built it out recently. At least on iOS, you can add exceptions if you want, like your favorites, or your contact list, or even specific people. You can also put it on a schedule if you think 24/7 is too extreme.

Honestly, I don't worry about the "urgent call from the doctor" scenario, and I have a family. If it's important, whoever is calling will leave a voicemail. For 99% of the calls I get, it's not even remotely important. I don't structure my life around outlier scenarios. Not having a phone constantly dinging and buzzing for my attention is worth missing the extremely rare emergency.

You can also have all numbers (calls) not in your contacts just go straight to voicemail via the "Silence Unknown Number," feature within the phone settings.

> If it's important, whoever is calling will leave a voicemail.

How do you test for this?

I don't know if this is some sort of convention or just a lot of coincidences but it seems when it is an urgent call, everyone calls twice. And they leave voicemail on the second call. This includes stuff like people running late, calls from daycare, etc.

For non-urgent matters like payments, they call once and leave a voicemail.

I think that depends on the greeting. If it doesn't clearly say your name (and or the LLC you're owning), they might not be sure it's the right number and not leave a message for privacy reasons.

Why, if they don't leave a voicemail, it must not have been an important call!

That’s exactly what they’ve been adding, actually. You can also set a schedule for which mode is active or trigger them with automations.

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