7 ms·

I think this is a cool hack. And I frequently use delayed messages on Google Messages to obscure my late working hours and refrain from disturbing people with a

• Xeoncross 4y ago
  Yeah, it's really weird to have to guess the settings other people desire. That's why do not disturb on / notifications off is on each of our phones. We control that. I don't expect other people to figure out the right timezone and sleep patterns I have.
• axg11 4y ago
  That’s idealism whereas this hack deals with realism: many people don’t have their notifications setup perfectly and also feel the pressure to respond immediately.
  • lesstyzing 4y ago
    Why’s that the message sender’s problem though? I can’t help if you pressure yourself even if I’m clear I’m putting none on you.
    • TheNorthman 4y ago
      > I can’t help if you pressure yourself even if I’m clear I’m putting none on you. That's... exactly what this is about. Now you _can_ help it.
    • ketzo 4y ago
      I would argue that, in most social contexts, “receiving a message” does put some amount of pressure on a person. Unless you have a really explicit understanding with the person you’re texting, they’re gonna assume you expect a response, or just expect them to read the message. You gotta know how your actions will be received; “I can’t help you” really just isn’t enough if you wanna be a kind and thoughtful person, IMO.
      • TameAntelope 4y ago
        I disagree; a message sent on an async platform is not expected to be responded to immediately, it's simply meant to be removed from the sender's "to-do" list.
        • noizejoy 4y ago
          The distinction between sync vs async messaging isn’t as easy to figure out these days as it was when snail mail vs phone call were the primary options.
          • TameAntelope 4y ago
            The negative consequences of making the wrong choice are both extremely low and extremely loud, so I urge you to just take a guess, with a strong bias for every technology platform being async.
    • noizejoy 4y ago
      Once upon a time, email was more generally considered to be non-interruptive, while a phone call and later sms was considered interruptive. Ober time, this distinction has blurred due to technology changes and resulting cultural adjustments including immediate email delivery, voicemail and advanced messaging and notification systems. And that change over time is causing some disconnects between expectations of good behaviour.
      • eastbound 4y ago
        *due to Samsung, who decided that every email deserved a ringing notification. It’s especially appalling when they played this trick on my old parents, who receive a slew of emails every morning at 5 or 6am.
    • prmoustache 4y ago
      Because if you are on duty for production issues you may not be able to put your entire smartphone in do not disturb yet you don't want to be woken up at 3 am because some coworker send you something non critical. Having separate devices for personnal and professional stuff helps. I can't speak about iOS, I used it way too long ago but both Android and most messaging platforms do not provide ways to have flexible do not disturb policies depending on multiple parameters such as sender/timeframe/app/format of message. It is usually a mix of the global do not disturb function for the OS, the global notification parameters per app and possibly some mute options on a contact/channel basis but that is not time range capable and only works on a blacklist instead of whitelist model.
      • TrickyRick 4y ago
        On iOS the two most popular systems for on-call (OpsGenie and Pager Duty) both bypass DND if configured correctly so it's a non-issue. I imagine Android has something similar.
        • prmoustache 4y ago
          Dunno my companies all used regular sms, teams or xmpp in the past.
• shaky-carrousel 4y ago
  Except for the part where you send me a message at 3 am about a work-related issue while I was placidly browsing Reddit and now you made me worry about work-related issues while on leisure time. Work-related messages during working hours, please.
  • texaslonghorn5 4y ago
    I agree, to be clear I continue to schedule messages despite my inner dialogue.
  • TameAntelope 4y ago
    No. Manage your own messaging systems, don't put that extra work onto others, as not everyone has the same schedule as you.
    • eastbound 4y ago
      In France, the law says the employer must use an email platform that disables communication during non-working hours. Yes, it exists. Yes, no-one can notify the guy on duty because no-one can send him emails.
      • sokoloff 4y ago
        Eventually, policies like these lead to “don’t hire employees in France”. At which point, no French employees are even bothered by employers on their free time again...
        • shaky-carrousel 4y ago
          Ah, you say "don't hire employees in France" but it reads "don't grab slaves in France". If worker's rights are an issue for you, those people in France are better without your "job", thank you very much. There are many many other jobs without near-slavery conditions, luckily.
          • 4y ago
• diegoperini 4y ago
  Do not disturb is terrible if you are a part-time caregiver or on pager duty. No phone OS gives enough control over its settings and bad news often arrive from unknown numbers, i.e the hospital, 3rd party robot call service, friend of a friend etc. Speaking from experience.
  • kuschku 4y ago
    I have mesages that can’t be linked to contacts on vibration during day (silent at night), messages from contacts on vibration during day (during night only the second message within of 15 minutes sends makes a noise), and phone calls always on loud. That catches all unexpected emergencies without bothering me too much due to emails, IRC messages, or a random text from a friend.
  • mgfist 4y ago
    A brute force solution would be a second (or third) phone for those situations
    • texaslonghorn5 4y ago
      That seems excessive, because the only people who you give the second number to would be the people setup to bypass the dnd anyway.
  • vlovich123 4y ago
    I have DND and the PagerDuty alerts are set to bypass it through the app. There can be improvements made but expecting your social graph to respect an assumed context has similar problems (not to mention due to spam I think most people screen/ignore calls from unknown numbers). I like iOS’s ability to share your DND state with your contacts but even that has challenges (eg people turn it off for privacy reasons real or perceived).
    • aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
      Why has the above (knowing how to properly use the devices that make their lives go round) become so rare?
• a-dub 4y ago
  i'm old school but: 1) there's this amazing tool that allows you to send a longform communication directly to one or many people where it will get stored and when they're starting their workday they'll see it. it's called e-mail. you should turn off notifications on your phone for e-mail... if a message is urgent, they can call or text. 2) you shouldn't obscure when you're working. creative people often prefer to work late, you should be honest about this so early morning expectations are relaxed. if you're typically a morning person and up on a production issue you should not be expected to be in first thing the next day after staying up late to fix it. 3) all this delayed fake timestamp messaging just contributes to a toxic culture of everybody appearing to be working all the time.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • s3p 4y ago
    Firstly, IMO, email is by no way amazing. It is useful and essentially a standard way of communicating by now, but I have never once thought of the communication protocol as being amazing. Second, there is nothing toxic about scheduling a text. My father is one of the people who never silences his phone, so when he gets a text or call at night he always wakes up. He gets annoyed if it's not urgent, so a scheduled text message in the morning would make him much happier. Scheduling a text message is all about convenience for the recipient of the message and comes out of a desire to be respectful of the other person's time.
    • UncleEntity 4y ago
      I agree with your father, if someone texts/calls during normal sleeping hours it really should be an emergency because if everyone mutes their phones and there’s a real emergency then nobody will be able to get in touch with anybody. Other than drunk friends and booty calls someone had better be in the hospital or dead if they wake me up in the middle of the night.
      • pseudalopex 4y ago
• yellow_postit 4y ago
  That's how my thinking has come around as well and a benefit of maintaining work vs. personal device separation. If I'm on a work computer/device/profile I don't mind seeing work-related items. Even better if its clear when action is needed. As many companies become more diverse in working times, trusting individuals to manage it seems like one option while the other is would be patterned off the French "Right to disconnect"
  • noizejoy 4y ago
    Culture is a shifting beast. Being courteous means trying to think on behalf of the other person. However, as we interact with ever increasing numbers of individuals with an ever increasing variety of backgrounds and personal circumstance, it’s increasingly impossible to think on behalf of everyone we interact with. And therefore it makes sense that we all need to design and configure mechanisms, that allow us to interact while keeping stress levels somewhat manageable.
• ian_lotinsky 4y ago
  Most of the time when I delay emails or Slack messages, it’s because I don’t want others to respond until later because of my own busyness or more important items to address today. Scheduling let’s me delay more back-and-forth but with the luxury of queuing my latest message now.
• duxup 4y ago
  I’d be ok with messages in a business app (teams, slack or whatever) at whatever hour. But if people are sending me iMessages to my personal phone number I’d be annoyed at just waking to a bunch of work stuff in there. Context would really depend on my response to asynchronous messages piling up.
• AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
  > But I've thought about this a bit recently, and I don't think I should have to worry about bothering someone at 3 AM. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect other people to have do not disturb on / notifications off whenever they don't want to be disturbed. I'm very direct about this with new hires. "I'm awake and work weird hours. Please don't take a message from me outside your normal hours to mean I want or need an immediate response unless the message is directly talking about a production outage in which case i'll be explicit about that. If you're around and you want to spend a few hours debating the merits of embedding a lua interpreter into a data processing pipeline vs trying to figure out how to droplessly reload golang code great, if not, we can pick it up the next time we're both around. On the same note, please don't not message me because it's late where you think I am at the moment and please don't not let me know about something because 'it's normal US hours, he probably already knows.' Please also don't take offense if I don't respond immediately, despite appearances, I do sometimes actually sleep." Setting the actual expectations works great. Some people respond simply by saying that they won't put slack on their phone, or will turn notifications for slack off and I'm fine with that (having their number to call for actual emergencies). I think the problem arises not from the direct actions here (messaging someone at 3am) but by the implicit expectation of a reply. I think some people don't realize what they're doing but I think a lot do and they want to create that implicit must-reply-24-7 nature.
  • texaslonghorn5 4y ago
    I get telling people that you are comfortable being contacted whenever. That's your choice/life. But if I was working for you I would not like this part: > unless the message is directly talking about a production outage in which case i'll be explicit about that because that means I have to keep notifications on and triage them even though the whole point is "I'm not going to respond outside work hours when my notifications are off / dnd is on."
    • jws 4y ago
      This is a frequent disconnect. It really depends on the scale of the business. In some large ones, there is always a person working to handle “must be fixed now” problems. If you are off shift, then it is the person on shift’s task. In smaller operations with 24 hour operation, and infrequent “must be fixed now” problems, there will be workers whose job includes being on call. Sometimes the on call duty rotates, sometimes it does not. So if you are from a land of large companies, it may seem insane for your employer to ask something of you outside your shift. Likewise, when you are a little guy scrambling to grow, getting out of bed once in a while and handling a problem to preserve that growth is your best option. In the situation in this post, I would hope that the critical “get up and fix this” messages come through a different system, or have a way to cut through a “do not disturb” so the employees can mute the mundane messages. It sounds like you are in the first group. My company didn’t staff 24 hours, but used to pay people extra when they were the “get up and handle this” person. The size of the pay, and the frequency of the events was tuned so there was always a willing pool of people queueing to be the pager carrier.
• wintermutestwin 4y ago
  >I don't think it's unreasonable to expect other people to have do not disturb on / notifications off whenever they don't want to be disturbed. This makes sense in a world where vendors have perfected notifications. IMO, notifications are still a cluster^*&k. This is why they are still very much a moving target for ios.
• bigiain 4y ago
  > I don't think I should have to worry about bothering someone at 3 AM. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect other people to have do not disturb on / notifications off whenever they don't want to be disturbed. I don't enable do not disturb for people who think that way. I just block them. If you are rude and entitled enough to decide you can disturb me any time you like, I'll ensure you can't. 3am calls/texts are fine for friends/family with an emergency. I will not let you put them at risk because I needed to dnd my phone because you choose to be a jerk.
  • Forgeties79 4y ago
    I think it’s sort of depends on the workplace culture and everybody buying in or not. At my company, they are very strict about “just because you message somebody on slack doesn’t mean they have to respond immediately.” The corollary is “if you don’t set yourself as away or indicate you’re on PTO, as long as it isn’t wildly outside of work hours I expect a response.” So I have no problem sending somebody a message at 10 AM on a Saturday. Because I know that everybody at the company generally has everything flipped off. Even if they get a notification, my assumption is that they will go “oh I forgot to turn that off,” flick it off, and promptly respond to me on Monday. Like most of these things, the devil is in the details. And if you don’t make the rules clear from the get-go, then it can be ripe for abuse and situations like you being bothered by people in the middle of the night arise.
  • jimwalsh 4y ago
    You realize phones can dnd everyone but the people you want to disturb you in the middle of the night now right?
    • bigiain 4y ago
      Sure. I choose to use default-allow, and block people I consider rude and/or abusive. I want my partner/friends/family to reliably be able to emergency call me from a payphone or borrowed phone, more than I want to pander to cow orkers with vestigial social skills.