A friend messaged me the other day. I saw it. I didn’t reply. A week later, I finally responded with the classic: Sorry for the late reply, just got to this.
She called me out. You didn’t just get to this, she said. I saw the double ticks.
Damn. She was right. I’d opened it. I’d registered it. But I’d also shelved it. It needed a proper reply, and at that moment, I wasn’t equipped.
Maybe it got lost between revisiting pictures from 2016 and the reminder I set to cancel my Nibble app 7-day trial on day 6. Maybe I got a call? Perhaps I’d wanted to sink back into that Substack article about reclaiming attention, ironically while still on social media. Maybe I was working one of the four jobs I need to survive under capitalism’s boot heel. Maybe I was doing nothing?
Does free time now equal availability?
I get a ping from the family group chat, which doubles as an IT helpdesk for my mum. My best friend just FaceTimed me about a White Lotus episode, and another left a voice note crying about a possible diagnosis. All this, lodged between videos of cats and genocide.
The boundaries between reception and response have collapsed.
It would be helpful if my phone had a built in snooze function. Sometimes I get a text and I want to snooze it for an hour. Just dismiss the notification and remind me later.
mostly I avoid a lot of the big drains (social media, other than lemmy) and tell people I’ll get back to them within 24 hours.
My Galaxy S21 has that, there’s a button to dismiss a notification and show it again in X minutes/hours.
You know you can just turn off notifications for apps you don’t want spamming you.
Yes, I am very aggressive about turning off notifications. The use case I had in mind is texts from friends, and I don’t want to turn those off. Like someone texts me something that requires thought or online connectivity, but I’m on the subway or at a concert. I want to snooze the message so it’ll remind me in a couple hours.
Sometimes for really important stuff I’ll set a timer myself, but that’s more steps than if the OS just had a “remind me later” built in.
If you have an iPhone, you can use the “scheduled summary” feature to delay notification delivery
My pixel lets me snooze notifications up to 2 hours if I expand them. Maybe yours has something like that?
I found a setting that alleged to enable snoozing, but it doesn’t seem to work. This is an older android phone though.