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Whenever I use delayed send at work, it’s for optics.

If I’m working outside of business hours (a few instances per week) I don’t like to slack my direct reports because I personally don’t want to create an “always on” culture at our company.

If your manager messages you at all hours of the day and on weekends, it can become unclear whether the same is expected of you. So, I like to delay messages to 8am the next morning, especially if they’re not time sensitive.

Imagine a message “Just a quick reminder that project X is due next week” sent at 7pm on Friday. Unless the person is expected to work over the weekend, why not delay it to 8am Monday?

Yes, where there's a large power imbalance, you have to take that into consideration. I manage people, and if I message one in their off time and it's not an emergency or something I really need them to answer if they see, I'll be careful to state clearly that no reply is needed or we can follow up on Monday or whenever they are next on.

Its the same reason I don't make jokes deprecating them to them within a group (and try not to in private with them). What can be a joint form of bonding where you make light fun of each other can start becoming bullying (even if inadvertently) when one party feels like they aren't free to fire back anymore. I've witnessed that dynamic before, where childhood friends worked with each other and one was the owner and continued the familiar personal reactions while the other started feeling less and less able to interact that way (at least in group settings).

Many of us are somewhat blind to certain power imbalances, others of us are very aware because they deal with it in many aspects of our lives. In any case, it usually matters if there's an imbalance, whether we want it to or not.

I think it doesn’t even need to be a large power imbalance. It is probably best for the longest-serving worker (aka, someone with only social seniority) to set a good example by making sure routine communications only show up during the work week.

> 'll be careful to state clearly that no reply is needed or we can follow up on Monday or whenever they are next on.

If my manager sent this, all it will do is make me think about it over the weekend, irrespective of the "lowering of importance". I would rather keep my mind free over the weekend and see the message Monday morning.

I agree, and I try not to message people on their time off, but if I felt it was important for some reason (for example, maybe if I'm not going to be around on that day which is the only reason I can remember doing it), I'd make sure to clarify expectations, or lack thereof.

Indeed. My circadian rhythm is set later than some of my colleagues, so if I'm working on something between 2200 and 2400, I set emails to be sent at ~0700 - 0800, when I know they'll be starting work.

I get no sort of he's-a-hard-worker credit for working late, but plenty of up-and-at-'em plaudits when they receive an email at what they think of as the "correct" time of day. Meanwhile, I'm asleep, and catch their first round of replies when I wake up. It's somewhat ridiculous, but not a big deal.

I hold the opposite opinion to most of this.

Text messaging, yes is asynchronous - but you don't know what the settings of the persons device are. They could have forgotten or not have quite hours set and now it is very much a synchronous notification even if it's not synchronous communication.

Sending delayed - again things happen. I would rather send a delayed message when I am in full control of the situation rather than possibly not the next morning due to any chain of events from weather, traffic, family, etc.

I feel like this comes from my philosophy of even if individuals are correct, it doesn't mean they are kind. We live in a community with individuals and we should compromise and balance things where needed.

Kindness starts by not immediately assuming the motivations of others to be malicious, and to understand why someone else would perform their actions. Here, it's very clear from how all paths are laid out that sending messages to you early even if you won't act on them is only ever a net-benefit if you remove your ego from the equation. Soothing fragile minds and compromise aren't the same thing.

but you don't know what the settings of the persons device are. They could have forgotten or not have quite hours set

FWIW, this is the prevailing opinion of almost everyone I know. The only question is what is the appropriate window when you should text. 8-22? 10-22?

I fully agree with this.

Some people, including myself unfortunately, are uncomfortable with unread messages. The biggest problem is, you’ll read the message, but not respond right away to avoid creating the impression “keep messaging me at this hour”. Then, when the appropriate time to answer comes, whatever your definition of that is, you’ll forget to actually answer.

I don’t have this problem with email, but messaging platforms create this with read receipts, online/offline status, etc.

Yeah but that assumes you know better than your recipient whether they should like to know that you’ve texted them. That’s a bad habit to get into.

Let people manage the settings on their own devices - whether they’ve forgotten to set their quiet hours is not your concern. Trust other people to take care of their own responsibilities. If they mess up, they deal with the consequences - it’s not your problem. If they feel the need to answer your text immediately when for you it wasn’t necessary, let them choose for themselves. Don’t presume to take that choice away from them.

It is my concern because relationships are built on trust. One can assume that everyone has a smartphone today and they know how to manage the settings on their devices. This is not the case. Technology agnostic - settings are either there or not. It is up to me as the sender and the one that would like to maintain respect, to be respectful with my communication. Which is to not begin or continue communication when it is not of the appropriate time.

>Not the point of the article, but this is a personal bugbear of mine - no it wasn't. Text-based communication is asynchronous.

That's irrelevant. They still get a notification to disturb them, they still can see it when looking at their phone, they can still be concerned about the content and how to respond later even if they don't answer, they can still be concerned about the content even if they don't read it, they could very well be waiting an important message at the time, they might have an experience with other people/ex-partners/etc pressuring them to answer immediately, and so on.

Technical terms like "asynchronous" don't mean anything to how people use a technology. Common social expectations do.

They get a notification if they have chosen to receive notifications. It's not like the sender forces themselves upon someone else.

I think this and the other comments here show an important cultural difference: Western culture places more emphasis on personal responsibility: if you don't want to be disturbed, the expectation is that you turn off notifications. Japanese culture seems to be the opposite, in that you expect others to know you do not want to be disturbed, and thus you don't bother with turning off notifications.

Western culture is not an unified blob, as it encompasses wildly different languages, customs, and peoples, ranging from Sweden to Mexico.

And just the same, Japanese people are not one unified blob and each have their own preferences regarding texting, just like the rest of us.

Doesn't matter, we can still talk about Western culture (meaning mostly Anglosaxon in this context, and including Europe in others) and Japanese culture.

It's about defaults and majority/average preferences, not about "every single one does this" and it gets tiring to remind people otherwise, as if they don't know.

It does matter, because the conversation is inaccurate at best when one tries to generalize their own personal experiences as the whole Western spectrum. Dating in Alabama is quite different from Rhode Island. We don't hold enough information to understand "defaults" or "majorities". Heck, we are at Hacker News, hardly the epicenter of social butterflies.

So even if there was such a thing as default, we wouldn't know it. Let alone from a foreign country that most natives don't speak a foreign language. How many Japanese relationships did you have to form such knowledge on the majority?

Last, but not least, it is not tiring to remind people to reframe the conversation. It is healthy and constructive.

I won't argue with your perspective on Western culture. I neither agree nor disagree.

But, I will say that to a greater degree than you perhaps would imagine, Japanese people by and large do know what to expect from other Japanese in minute contextual detail. And with that knowledge, they try very hard to meet others' expectations.

>It does matter, because the conversation is inaccurate at best when one tries to generalize their own personal experiences as the whole Western spectrum. Dating in Alabama is quite different from Rhode Island.

What matters for the analogy to be useful is if there are two big clusters in east and west. Not regional differences within the clusters, or between individuals.

My wife is incredibly western and low-context. She still gets pissed off when friends and/or family in different timezones wake her up in the middle of the night with text messages.

Note that the article is from 2013, when automatic silencing of notifications at night was still relatively new. Do Not Disturb on iOS was just introduced one year prior. Previously you wouldn’t message someone at inappropriate hours, just like you wouldn’t call them.

They get a notification if they haven't actively opted out of notifications. I think there is an important distinction between "not opting out" and "choosing to"

Now on top of annoying them, now you're dictating their phone settings too?

What if they don't want to stop notifications?

What if they don't know how to do it?

What if they want to still get one from the child or partner or friend who's travelling if anything happens to them?

Should they turn it on and off for your convenience, lest you have to forego sending a non-essential text at night?

I'm not dictating anything. You don't want notifications? Great! You can disable them. You want notifications only between these sets of timespans? No problem! Oh you want blacklist/whitelist certain groups/people? Can do!

The receiver has full agency of when they receive notifications and of whom. In fact a person NOT sending a message and keeping it stored later is, in fact, taking away agency of the receiver. The sender assumes he knows better then the receivers.

>I'm not dictating anything. You don't want notifications? Great! You can disable them. You want notifications only between these sets of timespans? No problem! Oh you want blacklist/whitelist certain groups/people? Can do!

But you're still sending the message, regardless of if they want it or not, and even if obviously they might not have done those things, not know how to do those things, or simply not want to have to do those things, but still not want to have to get some message at night.

Sorry, but you're intruding with your late nightn message. And that's irrelevant to what they have or haven't set on their phone.

>In fact a person NOT sending a message and keeping it stored later is, in fact, taking away agency of the receiver. The sender assumes he knows better then the receivers.

It's not about agency, it's about courtesy.

my phone allows me to set who i get notifications from. (my settings are to silence everyone except immediate family)

if they don't know how, the first time they bring up this issue, i'll help them change their settings.

yes, there are always corner cases, and there may be a situation where it is necessary to avoid sending messages at certain times. but this can be communicated. what bothers me is people getting upset if they receive a message at the wrong time as if it was the senders fault.

I'd say it's up to the individual whether they find something rude or not. It's not an objective truth, and it certainly varies between cultures. On top of that, different forms of communication have different conventions and practices. Slack is different from normal texts, which are different from emails, and so on, and they permeate your life to various degrees.

It's rather meaningless to let the receiver decide. It means that the only safe-not-to-be-rude option is to adhere to the strictest interpretation of rudeness. At the extreme sensitivity, you basically can't communicate with anyone unless you ask their preferences beforehand over a confirmed-not-rude channel.

Following this direction puts the default for each medium, regardless of its properties, into "it's rude to attempt communication".

IMO, it's overkill. We invented communication to communicate, and we built in things like being asynchronous to some forms of communication. So we should not give them up just because someone might find it rude. There's a level after which the sender should have more say over what is rude than the receiver.

I perceive it as rude to get messages in the middle of the night.

I'm just saying that what someone may perceive as rudeness, someone else may not, and vice versa. Social interaction and communication is a balance between many things, and if you don't take your potential for rudeness into consideration at all, people will probably not like you very much (which I guess some people are fine with). Either way, I don't think anyone would advocate for taking things to the extremes mentioned in your post.

you missed one outcome: the message is buried under a bunch of other messages, or even ignored because it didn't come during work hours. (assuming both sides know each others work hours)

yes, i agree that getting upset when you get a message while sleeping is not right, but sending a delayed message when you have the option to can be a good idea.

No, I think it's inconsiderate to text people when they are likely sleeping. If you have kids/family you typically don't silence your phone at night in case there's an emergency. So if I get a text at 03:00 I'm likely to wake up and look at it.

You're the one sending the message, so you're the one who should wait to do it when it it will be convenient for the recipient. If you're texting me in the middle of sleeping hours, you're telling me that your convenience is more important to you than mine.

'Do not disturb' settings have been granular enough for awhile now, such that this is no longer a problem unless you want it to be.

It might surprise you how many people don't know how to, or don't bother with, setting DnD. Or they simply forgot this time to enable it.

Sure you can blame the other person. But what good outcome do you gain by such an attitude?

Sure you can blame the other person. But what good outcome do you gain by such an attitude?

People need to learn to take control of their situation and not rely on others to do it for them? That seems to be the norm in Western cultures, at least.

Note that the article is ten years old, and the recounted event would have been even longer ago.

I think you're probably overestimating how much most people know or care to worry about setting custom do not disturb settings, although that's just my anecdotal guess based on interactions with friends outside the tech space. Also, I'd consider myself pretty on top of tech (enough to run cyanogenmod/lineageos/grapheneos) and have a custom DnD schedule, but I had no idea setting it per contact was an option until you hinted that it might be. I've been wanting that for a while so thanks for letting me know, but also I'd imagine most people are very unaware of that option still.

You're still putting the burden on the receipient to setup a system that filters out emergencies and non emergencies, and who they want messages from at what time, potentialy switching things on and off as their schedule changes etc. Basicaly they're still spending time and effort so you don't have to.

I don't know about you, but for me spending that time and effort is a requirement, and not just because of friends or relatives sending me text messages when I'm asleep. If I don't set up do-not-disturb, I'll get woken up by various automated messages and alerts from different apps, not actual humans: maybe Amazon sends me an alert about something that's on sale, maybe a news app sends a notification about a new story, etc. Just looking at my phone now, I have a notification at 5:08AM from Meetup about events tomorrow, another one at 3:33AM about some event scheduled in a group I follow, there's a YouTube notification at 7:55AM about some video posted, etc. So either I go to all these stupid apps individually and see if they have a mechanism for restricting when they send notifications (maybe, probably not), or I simply set a do-not-disturb setting for the hours I'm normally asleep and don't get bothered by anything.

My work alerts are very granually defined.

On Personal alerts though I gave up the granular filtering a long time ago, real people in my contact list all go through without any specific rules, and I'll actually tell people to stop sending me links to facebook rants in the middle of the night.

Some of the companies and automated services have special rules (my bank, Google account alerts etc.) to let notifications through, but by default I won't allow any service to have notification bells, mail and SMS are silent as well.

>real people in my contact list all go through without any specific rules, and I'll actually tell people to stop sending me links to facebook rants in the middle of the night.

Instead of expecting them to guess your waking hours, you could just set your DND to not alarm during those hours. If I didn't do that, I'd be frequently woken by things like Facebook Messenger message alerts.