That's exactly the point: there is no just in case. The rule is simple: all notifications must always be silent (not calls), if you need to reach anyone in real-time, you have to call them. No checking your phone, no constant attention grabbing notification sounds, your time is yours, life is beautiful. Whoever invented that each and every notification message requests your attention is an idiot.
But even that is not good enough, that doesn't capture the nuances of priority. A call from a family member at the middle of the night is clearly relevant but a call from a random number, someone you don't care much about or some company wanting to sell something is probably irrelevant.
Agreed. One approach could be getting yourself and your family on a completely separate IM network which is trustworthy and is not used for anything else. Then, you can set sounds for this particular app to loud plus vibration.
I built basically this on top of my telegram setup last year. The thing that killed it was group chats, per-message LLM calls on a busy group eat your api budget alive, so I ended up putting a tiny local model in front as a first pass.
Yeah, in my implementation I pretty much ignore everything from groups except for explicit mentions to my telegram user, in that case that message is forwarded to claude to decide if sending a notification. That keeps the LLM calls pretty low.