I didn’t hate catching up with people over AIM nearly as much as I do over text. Once you were off AIM, you were off. SMS/iMessage/etc. are an open-ended conversation that spans hours or days with ambiguous expectations of responsiveness. In the past you were unequivocally sitting at your computer, looking to chat. Now you could be out working in the yard, running errands, trying to watch a movie, or generally doing something in real life that is interrupted by the constant stream of incoming messages from unknowing friends.
> I didn’t hate catching up with people over AIM nearly as much as I do over text.
You had a keyboard for that, too. Nothing is quite so annoying as trying to have a conversation with someone when one party is on a keyboard and the other is on a phone.
I'm just... "not online" a lot of the time now. Stuff will get to me when it gets to me, and if I've gone a couple days without being really on the various messengers, that's fine. Expectation is that if you need something critical, call, otherwise I'll get back to you eventually.
It seems like you should be able to make the call on what people should expect wrt your responsiveness.
I definitely know for most of my friends how they are responsive in what situation and I'm fine with their different rules. I expect them the same for me. Never told them but I have not had issues so far.
Just answer however you feel like doing this and people will have no choice to catch up anyway. It's probably fine to take hours or even wait the next day to answer a text. If someone asks you can tell them. If you feel pressure from message (notifications) to answer, that's probably something you can learn to manage and let go.
I know few people who actually expect others to be able to answer fast any time. I'm quite responsive myself usually but I fully expect most of my friends to answer in a few hours or even the next day, and if they answer fast, that's neat but not expected. Some friends take days to answer, I adapt. If they miss something, their loss at the end, but usually I think they see the message quite fast so that does not happen. If I propose something to a friend who usually answers the last minute and something else come up, I consider I can cancel with this last minute friend so I don't let their rules eat me neither.
Don't let the phone or the computer control you. That should be the reverse. If you are spending time with someone or watching a movie, just don't check out your phone. Put it away. It's going to be fine. If anything urgent happens they will call. Tell them if it's not clear for them. I do not answer non urgent stuff when I'm actually with other people in real life. They have priority. That allows me to enjoy and focus on them better. Messaging stays asynchronous and that's how it's designed.
Life is so enjoyable this way.
I have progressed to a point where I essentially have do not disturb on all day with my partner and mother allowed through as well as two apps for work and the rest receiving a DND response. I also have it set so repeated calls come though from my favorites in the case of an emergency.
interrupted by the constant stream of incoming messages from unknowing friends
You can probably edit, including disabling, notifications from the different messaging apps. Don't worry about your friends. They understand this is asynchronous communication.
It was the same with ICQ. You could sent messages when someone was offline or away but it didn't showed up on their screens until they've switch to an Online status.
It was much more useful and productive than today constant chatter.
There's definitely room to improve in the products (ie I think Slack's recent scheduled messages are a good improvement towards this), but personal discipline goes a long way here, especially when frequently the product/company goals (pumping engagement) are the inverse of your own.
You need to set your own boundaries, and not allow these devices/services to dictate so much of your attention (I say as I procrastinate on HN). Use app or OS features to mute notifications. Sign out. Wait before replying. Leave your phone behind.
99 times out of 100 you can definitely just wait before checking and replying.
I hate the opposite: I can't know when someone is free and ready to chat with me. I may send a message and wait 30 seconds or 3 hours until I can get a conversation going. Or get responses every 20 minutes instead of every 2 minutes.
Remember that back in the day your computer was not online 24/7/365. Away messages were really useful, because without them someone would have to literally sit at their chat window when you were online and wait for you to respond. If you were offline, there was no away message, and no way to send you a message at all.
I was one of a handful of people who wrote AIM bots for things like store-and-forward messaging. You tell the bot who you want to talk to and your message, and when they came back online the bot would send them your message. This completed the functionality we all needed: just make sure my message gets to the person eventually.
I don't think we want to bring back that experience. Facebook and WhatsApp and other messengers already give the ability to send a message when someone is offline, as well as letting you have a live interaction when online. All someone needs to do is set themselves as 'offline' and they can still get messages without having to respond. I think this is the right balance. The away message only makes sense if you want to be online and simultaneously tell people you aren't responding. Well, if you're not responding, why not just set yourself as offline?
However, I do like the idea of the away message as a polite OOO message. "Hello, I'm in the Adirondacks this weekend, I won't be back in contact until Monday." In this way you can politely tell friends why you're not responding and when they can try again.
I find it inflexible to acknowledge that Slack has status messaging, but then reject it just because it isn't what you grew up with. Their main reason for rejecting it is that people can still send you messages. OK, fine - Just ignore them. Minimize Slack, or shut it off, and go about your day. Check back in later to catch up on things. After all, you don't answer your phone every time it rings, you don't reply to email every time, so why do people let themselves be driven by Slack messages?
The problem here is your team's messaging culture, not the tech.
> I miss Away Messages. This nostalgia is layered in abstraction; I probably miss the newness of the internet of the 1990s, and I also miss just being … away.
The difference is that Slack has a mobile app so when you step away from your computer, you’re not really “away” like you used to be before smartphones were a thing.
Yes, you can disable notifications or try to ignore them, but that’s not the author’s point. I read it more as them longing for “a better time,” similar to an expression of nostalgia for the simplicity of one’s childhood.
I cannot recommend enough cultivating a reputation for being grumpy but fair. Try and make approaching you like a game of Dark Souls; rewarding if the player is prepared. People will respect your time and accept death as the penalty for failure.
This reminds me of Hamming's "You And Your Research" speech, specifically what he said about open vs closed doors:
"If you work with the door closed, you won't be interrupted - you get your work done. You work with your door open, people come by and stop and chat and so on, so on but I've noticed very clearly at Bell Laboratories those who work with door shut may be working just as hard ten years later but they don't know what to work on. They are not connected with reality. Those who have the door open may very well know what's important. I cannot prove to you whether the open door causes the open mind or whether the open mind causes the open door. I can only establish the correlation and it was quite spectacular. Almost always the guys with the door closed were often very well able, very gifted but they seemed to work always on slightly the wrong problem."
My general rule about communicating that I tell people about is that if you want/need a response call me, otherwise I have no guarantee I'll remember to reply or text you back.
This comes down to having distinct synchronous and asynchronous communication platforms. Back in the day you has email for async and aol/msn/icq for sync. On top of that they were only on your computer, and most people had desktops, you had to physically be at your computer to use them. The joy of sitting there chatting away with friends while doing homework or playing games was brilliant.
On top of that, if you weren’t online in a group chat as it was happening, you missed it, there was no catching up.
Text messaging sat in a middle ground, but because it cost money for each message (10p in the UK) it was self limiting. You couldn’t afford to have whole conversations via text.
Bring back synchronous only messaging, and even better make it only work on a computer, not on mobile! I would love that.
(I suspect the issue is so many kids now only have smartphones and tablets)
It was so much easier when there was one program where all your chats lived, and where this program was only on one device.
This article made me decide to shut up a lot of notifications. So I got to pick up the iPhone and both of the iPads, scroll through a lengthy list of every app on all three of those devices that's ever requested the power of sending a notification, find the apps people talk to me on, and turn off their ability to make a popup and a noise happen.
And then I get to do it again on the computer I'm typing this on. Except there it's a mishmash of individual program's settings and stuff in the "notifications" section of OSX's preferences. It looks like I was a lot more aggressive in making stuff not notify me on the the computer so there's not much to turn off.
I really miss the days when all my chatting happened via Adium. One program. On one device.
It was Trillian for me - one program and a ton of protocols. It was also a pain to setup though and often had to be updated as shit changed.
If you take the time to really customize your notifications you can make them pretty powerful - I have a huge system of color coded emails in both my personal and work email and only get notifications on my mobile device for the ones I find important. It takes up a good amount of time to initially setup all of these filters and whatnot but after the fact it is totally worth it. I spent about one full work day on each (work and personal) and occasionally tune it after that (only a few minutes). I wish I had done it sooner.
For those that really get annoyed by constant dings you can also do what my friend did - he turned on do not disturb (DnD) all the time. He then turned on the function where if someone calls back twice in a row they will blow past the DnD. And then added specific close people to the list of exceptions. At the time I thought this was a bit crazy but now I use a similar system at night when sleeping and sometimes when on vacation and it works surprisingly well.
They can also go too far in the other direction...
Cow-orker in other department always leaves their ${company internal IM client} status as "Away" because they are 'tired of those marketing ppl always bugging them'. This, of course, misleads everyone else in the company, not knowing if they are even working that day.
Sometimes they change it to "Away - Here, but working" which I guess deters only the ppl that look at the colored dot, not the text. This is exactly what the DND (different color) is for, but they cannot seem to comprehend that either, even after an explanation.
Like many things...it is a powerful tool that produces catastrophic results when wielded by those who do not understand how it works.
I did that - my IM client was on permanent 'away' status. I was tired of being 'green' and people would send multiple messages if I didn't respond instantly to their IMs.
Being permanently 'away' meant people could still contact me and I could respond when convenient without disrupting my work.
I very much subscribe to the convention that proximity should determine how much communication should interrupt what you are doing. Face to Face > Phone/video Call > IM > Email
During the peak of the original lockdowns I liked setting my "away" message to something comedic - the trend caught on with a few people I worked with.
This was inspired by an email signature I saw years ago from a coworker who is a super successful writer for a well known comedic TV show - it was a riff on the standard iOS email signature - instead hers said at the very end of every email:
I would like a physical version of the status message. An e-ink or other low res display with up to 160 char, connected to the internet, which I can place on my desk and can update from my phone to let my co-workers know where I am. Does something like this already exist?
There was an interesting startup from a few years back that would basically issue everybody in your company a dedicated android tablet on a stand that shipped with a customized collaboration software.
I'm not sure I'd like to use it myself, but it had some interesting UX ideas around always on video (but blurred out and audio muted) so you and your team were more "present".
I can't find it now, but a part of it was a better away message setup for the same reasons.
In the past, I had a small whiteboard on my door I could write my away messages on (lunch, meeting, vacation, etc) and people could leave short replies on it when they didn't want to send an email (call me, borrowed your charger. It worked great but only really works when you work in an office all day and can update it when you get back from wherever you went.
I never used away messages on AIM - I'd just sign offline (AIM for the longest time didn't support offline messages) what I miss is being away conceptually.
I remember the time before everyone had cell phones, when I might be out all day (as a late teen, and a little older - I didn't get a mobile phone until 20), and I'd have a couple bucks in quarters if I needed to phone home (or anyone) and had my important phone numbers memorized. I also had a pager for a while, so if someone really needed me, they could page me, and I could call them back when I was near a phone.
When I was driving, I was away, on my bike? away, out for a walk? away - while I could check in with people if needed, I wasn't constantly reachable.
Now there are half a dozen ways anyone can reach me, at any time, and for a variety of cultural reasons, if I'm offline for more than a couple hours - I have people who will be concerned.
I might be too Gen X for this but I'm a firm believer in just cultivating a messaging etiquette with the people I know and not outsourcing it to a status message. My boomer family knows they can always contact me via text and chat and my millenial/zoomer family knows I'm often away from my phone hours at a time. It seems pretty manageable, honestly.
Same here. I have all notifications turned off on my phone. Friends know that I only check Whatsup twice a week. Text or call and I'll usually see it within two hours. I don't really understand people who complain about these things. I guess we are wired differently. Whenever I check Whatsup I realise I didn't miss anything at all.
At work we have Slack and I made it clear that I might not be able to answer for hours. Use email and I'll decide if it's important and if so will answer within an hour or leave it for another day. I also insist that everything client/work related is in an email. If it's on Slack only then it doesn't exist.
Twitter and other "microblogging" sites used to be ways to share something akin to your "away" status. You'd post what you're busy doing now. "Reuven is eating lunch" or "Reuven is driving to Ojai."
I'd rather we taught people not to start a messaging/slack/teams/whatsapp/etc session with "hello". Don't say "hello" and then make people wait for however long it takes for you to type whatever it was you really wanted to say. This isn't a telephone. Stop trying to use async comms as if they were synchronous. It's rude and annoying.
I find this trends pretty well across generations - young people are rarely starting with "hello". I suspect people above a certain age just find doing it that way more polite
This is a really fantastic point, especially considering Slack lets you just get pulled in to something without accepting the invite or consenting to join. I prefer properly run chat channels over DMs (knowledge silos are bad), but the fact that Slack would let someone create a room, invite you to it, and start `@channel` blasting at any time is wild. At least we get the ability to snooze notifications based on time, I guess.
Worth noting that Apple introduced Focus in the last version of iOS that added custom behaviours around this. If you message someone who is using a 'work' profile for example and have decided to ignore messages, the messaging user will be informed before they send the message that you have notifications disabled.
This information is also available to developers, so other chat apps could let messaging users know that a user is 'away' for example.
I quite like the idea of having an 'away' profile that I can set that is automatically mirrored across all my devices and all the third party apps I use honour the setting and make use of it, so anyone trying to contact me is told that I am away and won't reply.
You can have multiple focus modes, each with custom aways, which can be shared or not, each with custom notification behaviors by person (or group, like favorites) texting you and by app trying to notify, and shared across devices or not.
Prior to Focus, you could abuse the “dnd while driving” option to reply with a long custom text message.
But Focus is well thought out as a way to make all your apps behave.
As has been said but not discussed much, the real difference with AIM was showing an error to the potential sender when they start to compose a message. User is offline, user is away. The latter is similar to presence indicators today (you can still send for eventual receipt), but the former is absent today (no major platform denies the ability to send for reasons of an offline recipient; they store it for later).
Totally absent. Could it ever return? The closest thing I can think of is when you disable voicemail and turn off your phone (callers are given an error message to try later) but how do we get this error in front of people messaging, while attempting to compose?
IIRC that was the original intention of Twitter -- in the beginning the prompt was "What are you doing?" and you were supposed to update with something like "Out for a hike" and not so much hot takes on politics.
There’s a way to do those with email. It’s usually called an out of office or automatic reply. In exchange it will show up before you send the email. of course, people only use this when they are on leave, but that’s just email culture.
You can't put the genie back in the bottle. The reason AIM felt better was because way fewer people were online and it tended towards smaller groups of more recent friends. In that environment synchronous chat was fun and novel.
Since then we've been inundated with always-on expectations, and the only way to maintain sanity now is to treat all text communications as varying degrees of asynchronous. Slack and others provide plenty of tools for this, though ultimately it's up to the individual to enforce them.
[+] [-] teeray|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Syonyk|3 years ago|reply
You had a keyboard for that, too. Nothing is quite so annoying as trying to have a conversation with someone when one party is on a keyboard and the other is on a phone.
I'm just... "not online" a lot of the time now. Stuff will get to me when it gets to me, and if I've gone a couple days without being really on the various messengers, that's fine. Expectation is that if you need something critical, call, otherwise I'll get back to you eventually.
[+] [-] jraph|3 years ago|reply
I definitely know for most of my friends how they are responsive in what situation and I'm fine with their different rules. I expect them the same for me. Never told them but I have not had issues so far.
Just answer however you feel like doing this and people will have no choice to catch up anyway. It's probably fine to take hours or even wait the next day to answer a text. If someone asks you can tell them. If you feel pressure from message (notifications) to answer, that's probably something you can learn to manage and let go.
I know few people who actually expect others to be able to answer fast any time. I'm quite responsive myself usually but I fully expect most of my friends to answer in a few hours or even the next day, and if they answer fast, that's neat but not expected. Some friends take days to answer, I adapt. If they miss something, their loss at the end, but usually I think they see the message quite fast so that does not happen. If I propose something to a friend who usually answers the last minute and something else come up, I consider I can cancel with this last minute friend so I don't let their rules eat me neither.
Don't let the phone or the computer control you. That should be the reverse. If you are spending time with someone or watching a movie, just don't check out your phone. Put it away. It's going to be fine. If anything urgent happens they will call. Tell them if it's not clear for them. I do not answer non urgent stuff when I'm actually with other people in real life. They have priority. That allows me to enjoy and focus on them better. Messaging stays asynchronous and that's how it's designed. Life is so enjoyable this way.
[+] [-] DougMellon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dfxm12|3 years ago|reply
You can probably edit, including disabling, notifications from the different messaging apps. Don't worry about your friends. They understand this is asynchronous communication.
[+] [-] JamesAdir|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] madeofpalk|3 years ago|reply
You need to set your own boundaries, and not allow these devices/services to dictate so much of your attention (I say as I procrastinate on HN). Use app or OS features to mute notifications. Sign out. Wait before replying. Leave your phone behind.
99 times out of 100 you can definitely just wait before checking and replying.
[+] [-] baisq|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway892238|3 years ago|reply
I was one of a handful of people who wrote AIM bots for things like store-and-forward messaging. You tell the bot who you want to talk to and your message, and when they came back online the bot would send them your message. This completed the functionality we all needed: just make sure my message gets to the person eventually.
I don't think we want to bring back that experience. Facebook and WhatsApp and other messengers already give the ability to send a message when someone is offline, as well as letting you have a live interaction when online. All someone needs to do is set themselves as 'offline' and they can still get messages without having to respond. I think this is the right balance. The away message only makes sense if you want to be online and simultaneously tell people you aren't responding. Well, if you're not responding, why not just set yourself as offline?
However, I do like the idea of the away message as a polite OOO message. "Hello, I'm in the Adirondacks this weekend, I won't be back in contact until Monday." In this way you can politely tell friends why you're not responding and when they can try again.
[+] [-] codingdave|3 years ago|reply
The problem here is your team's messaging culture, not the tech.
[+] [-] claviska|3 years ago|reply
> I miss Away Messages. This nostalgia is layered in abstraction; I probably miss the newness of the internet of the 1990s, and I also miss just being … away.
The difference is that Slack has a mobile app so when you step away from your computer, you’re not really “away” like you used to be before smartphones were a thing.
Yes, you can disable notifications or try to ignore them, but that’s not the author’s point. I read it more as them longing for “a better time,” similar to an expression of nostalgia for the simplicity of one’s childhood.
[+] [-] notjustanymike|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NateEag|3 years ago|reply
"If you work with the door closed, you won't be interrupted - you get your work done. You work with your door open, people come by and stop and chat and so on, so on but I've noticed very clearly at Bell Laboratories those who work with door shut may be working just as hard ten years later but they don't know what to work on. They are not connected with reality. Those who have the door open may very well know what's important. I cannot prove to you whether the open door causes the open mind or whether the open mind causes the open door. I can only establish the correlation and it was quite spectacular. Almost always the guys with the door closed were often very well able, very gifted but they seemed to work always on slightly the wrong problem."
[+] [-] stingta|3 years ago|reply
Call if its an emergency, and its probably not really am emergency for me if you don't have my number
[+] [-] Zircom|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jesterson|3 years ago|reply
I am using same rule and my slack is very quiet while colleagues are constantly complaining of distracting messages.
[+] [-] samwillis|3 years ago|reply
On top of that, if you weren’t online in a group chat as it was happening, you missed it, there was no catching up.
Text messaging sat in a middle ground, but because it cost money for each message (10p in the UK) it was self limiting. You couldn’t afford to have whole conversations via text.
Bring back synchronous only messaging, and even better make it only work on a computer, not on mobile! I would love that.
(I suspect the issue is so many kids now only have smartphones and tablets)
[+] [-] egypturnash|3 years ago|reply
This article made me decide to shut up a lot of notifications. So I got to pick up the iPhone and both of the iPads, scroll through a lengthy list of every app on all three of those devices that's ever requested the power of sending a notification, find the apps people talk to me on, and turn off their ability to make a popup and a noise happen.
And then I get to do it again on the computer I'm typing this on. Except there it's a mishmash of individual program's settings and stuff in the "notifications" section of OSX's preferences. It looks like I was a lot more aggressive in making stuff not notify me on the the computer so there's not much to turn off.
I really miss the days when all my chatting happened via Adium. One program. On one device.
[+] [-] Melatonic|3 years ago|reply
If you take the time to really customize your notifications you can make them pretty powerful - I have a huge system of color coded emails in both my personal and work email and only get notifications on my mobile device for the ones I find important. It takes up a good amount of time to initially setup all of these filters and whatnot but after the fact it is totally worth it. I spent about one full work day on each (work and personal) and occasionally tune it after that (only a few minutes). I wish I had done it sooner.
For those that really get annoyed by constant dings you can also do what my friend did - he turned on do not disturb (DnD) all the time. He then turned on the function where if someone calls back twice in a row they will blow past the DnD. And then added specific close people to the list of exceptions. At the time I thought this was a bit crazy but now I use a similar system at night when sleeping and sometimes when on vacation and it works surprisingly well.
[+] [-] throwaway8grf7|3 years ago|reply
Cow-orker in other department always leaves their ${company internal IM client} status as "Away" because they are 'tired of those marketing ppl always bugging them'. This, of course, misleads everyone else in the company, not knowing if they are even working that day.
Sometimes they change it to "Away - Here, but working" which I guess deters only the ppl that look at the colored dot, not the text. This is exactly what the DND (different color) is for, but they cannot seem to comprehend that either, even after an explanation.
Like many things...it is a powerful tool that produces catastrophic results when wielded by those who do not understand how it works.
[+] [-] nwiswell|3 years ago|reply
In this case the "catastrophic result" is being forced to resort to email.
[+] [-] tobtoh|3 years ago|reply
Being permanently 'away' meant people could still contact me and I could respond when convenient without disrupting my work.
I very much subscribe to the convention that proximity should determine how much communication should interrupt what you are doing. Face to Face > Phone/video Call > IM > Email
[+] [-] Melatonic|3 years ago|reply
This was inspired by an email signature I saw years ago from a coworker who is a super successful writer for a well known comedic TV show - it was a riff on the standard iOS email signature - instead hers said at the very end of every email:
"Sent from YOUR iPhone!"
[+] [-] slingnow|3 years ago|reply
We must have very different definitions of the word "catastrophic" ...
[+] [-] elzbardico|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pazimzadeh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmrm|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelbuckbee|3 years ago|reply
I'm not sure I'd like to use it myself, but it had some interesting UX ideas around always on video (but blurred out and audio muted) so you and your team were more "present".
I can't find it now, but a part of it was a better away message setup for the same reasons.
[+] [-] wildzzz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aloha|3 years ago|reply
I remember the time before everyone had cell phones, when I might be out all day (as a late teen, and a little older - I didn't get a mobile phone until 20), and I'd have a couple bucks in quarters if I needed to phone home (or anyone) and had my important phone numbers memorized. I also had a pager for a while, so if someone really needed me, they could page me, and I could call them back when I was near a phone.
When I was driving, I was away, on my bike? away, out for a walk? away - while I could check in with people if needed, I wasn't constantly reachable.
Now there are half a dozen ways anyone can reach me, at any time, and for a variety of cultural reasons, if I'm offline for more than a couple hours - I have people who will be concerned.
[+] [-] stolenmerch|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alar44|3 years ago|reply
I don't use any DND or away messaging. I answer when I choose to answer.
I don't really get the issue.
[+] [-] helij|3 years ago|reply
At work we have Slack and I made it clear that I might not be able to answer for hours. Use email and I'll decide if it's important and if so will answer within an hour or leave it for another day. I also insist that everything client/work related is in an email. If it's on Slack only then it doesn't exist.
[+] [-] astrange|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] schrodinger|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fortran77|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dopeboy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] synu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EddieDante|3 years ago|reply
https://www.nohello.com/
[+] [-] Melatonic|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tiffanyh|3 years ago|reply
What I dislike about Slack is that it makes it way too easy to create new (group) Channel and then the signal-to-noise ratio drops off a cliff.
Maybe this is just a function of where I've worked and used Slack, but most of the chatting is happening in group Channels, not 1:1.
[+] [-] eddieroger|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] warpkid|3 years ago|reply
This information is also available to developers, so other chat apps could let messaging users know that a user is 'away' for example.
I quite like the idea of having an 'away' profile that I can set that is automatically mirrored across all my devices and all the third party apps I use honour the setting and make use of it, so anyone trying to contact me is told that I am away and won't reply.
https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/682143
[+] [-] Terretta|3 years ago|reply
You can have multiple focus modes, each with custom aways, which can be shared or not, each with custom notification behaviors by person (or group, like favorites) texting you and by app trying to notify, and shared across devices or not.
Prior to Focus, you could abuse the “dnd while driving” option to reply with a long custom text message.
But Focus is well thought out as a way to make all your apps behave.
[+] [-] hunter2_|3 years ago|reply
Totally absent. Could it ever return? The closest thing I can think of is when you disable voicemail and turn off your phone (callers are given an error message to try later) but how do we get this error in front of people messaging, while attempting to compose?
[+] [-] littleweep|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twobitshifter|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dasil003|3 years ago|reply
Since then we've been inundated with always-on expectations, and the only way to maintain sanity now is to treat all text communications as varying degrees of asynchronous. Slack and others provide plenty of tools for this, though ultimately it's up to the individual to enforce them.