I was hoping this article was going to highlight the emotional issues with responding instantly as opposed to the "lack of time" issue. I don't respond to most texts instantly, not because I'm driving or busy with my life, but because I just don't feel like responding right away. I am not sure why this is. I am not trying to be rude, and most of the time I feel bad about it and think that maybe I have communication issues, such as keeping in touch with people. But I am starting to realize that we shouldn't be expected to respond immediately "just because". We shouldn't have to be occupied to warrant not responding. Unfortunately, it is a stigma, and people will continue to get upset if they don't hear back within a matter of minutes. I wish someone would touch on this issue as I've never really seen it discussed.
I read the article, and it wasn't all that insightful, to be honest.
However, this is a topic I'm very interested in because my fiancee is the first person I've ever met that does not reply back soon to a text message and hardly picks up her phone.
When we first started dating, this was a little strange. She would sometimes reply back within minutes. Other times she would take up to two hours. I couldn't gauge her interest in me.
It turns out due to her age and culture (non-Western), she just simply does not use her phone that much. So she isn't looking at it a lot.
We've argued that there must be a middle ground, though, and this is where it gets interesting.
This isn't really a technology problem. It is a philosophical one.
When we deal with people everyday, there is an unwritten and unspoken social contract we agree on. The case for not replying immediately to a stranger or an acquaintance is easily accepted, I believe. As the article says, you may be driving, you may be in another phone call, busy reading or studying. A stranger or acquaintance takes a longer time to sit higher up in your priority list. This is a basic socialization rule. I accept these things easily, and what's more, I act according to this concept. I basically categorise people's importance in my world. Even if I've read the text message, seen the missed phone call, or read the email. These categories are key, I believe.
However, when a loved one, your significant other, spouse, fiancee or fiance, messages you or phones you or emails you, it is a totally different ball game, in my view. Emergency purposes, communicating your whereabouts sooner makes cohabitation much easier, especially when planning your day, unexpected plans, people know your schedule/routine and any changes may cause grief to your loved ones, etc.
I do feel like family whom you do not live with is considered a step down in the priority list, but those you live with, specifically a partner, is different. And feeling insulted when they don't respond within 30 minutes at most generally, is pretty natural.
Learn to trust people, especially your significant other.
Their use habits have nothing to do with your relationship.
Demanding that someone change gets ugly quick, especially when you single them out as a unique case. Why don't those standards apply to everyone else?
Be honest about the role of fear in your rationalization. Sounds like there's a lot you can learn about living a more balanced life from this person. Unexpected events will always happen, technology won't change that, and blaming their occurrence (partially or totally) on a lack of communication is just not right.
My significant other and I are a lot alike. We've happily accepted what it takes to live with another person, as two people who were used to doing stuff on their own and living alone. She doesn't speak English well, and learning her language has been fascinating!
Thankfully, we are the happiest we've ever been. I think knowing someone who is from a totally different culture from you puts things in perspective and the dynamic is totally different from being with someone from your own culture.
We often read things in Western publications, and laugh and say, "Wow, this is so American/Canadian/Western". It's funny how everything we read in English totally never even considers that there might be another "normal". Even in scientific publications.
With regard to those standards applying to everyone, sorry, I'm not Christian and don't believe we should love everyone and give everyone our undivided attention. This, of course, is an ideological difference. My time is important. However, if I do choose to give you my undivided attention, I will listen to you very carefully.
Personally, I don't identify with any titles, and that's where my compassion for other situations comes from. (People do try though; just the other day someone attempted to label my image as "Amish surfer"...)
My point being: it's irrelevant wether someone is "Western", Christian or otherwise; all that is important is their desire. Language is often inadequate for expressing these motivations (even moreso when there is a barrier). Respect others as capable, intelligent humans who have experienced just as much circumstance as you, and allow them to make their own decisions.
Their conclusions will likely be different from your own, but that shouldn't be offensive. Everyone is unique.
>This isn't really a technology problem. It is a philosophical one.
Yep. My cell phone is for my convenience not anyone else's (except my spouse). They're not paying my bill. For all intents and purposes people should think of my cell phone as a land line, assume it is plugged in charging next to my bed. Also, if I'm eating a meal, entertaining/have guests, not in the mood, I will not answer your call or immediately reply to your text messages.
Now, if you're my spouse, I expect more timely responses if you are aware of an attempt to communicate (text message, missed call, incoming call) but try to understand that they may be busy or unable to get back to me right away.
> but those you live with, specifically a partner, is different. And feeling insulted when they don't respond within 30 minutes at most generally, is pretty natural.
I agree. That's my biggest irritation. If I get done with work and try to get a hold of my wife but can't. If I get home and she and the children are not there my blood boils. We have come to an agreement. If she leaves the house or will be away from her phone for a period (in the pool), especially around when I get done with work, that she will send me a text message letting me know. This helps greatly.
Agree. If I have a formal relationship with you, or I'm just a casual not-so-great friend, I understand receiving messages at any convenient time. But with loved ones, especially if they've seen the message, a no-reply within a reasonable time would just indicate lack of interest in me. Of course they might be busy, in which case I'd expect a response indicating the same. Mobile communication is easy, it just takes some etiquettes you previously hadn't learned.
I would find it infuriating if I was expected to reply to every contact within 30 minutes. Sure, if it's important I'll reply. But otherwise? It feels control-freaky.
While I admit that at times I wish I could Reply Later to my wife, I remember that almost every time I text her, it's a matter of relative time sensitivity, even if not important.
"Do you want me to buy X or Y beer?" "Do we have soccer tonight?" "Do I need to come home early?", "what were the days of our planned vacation?"
Almost all of those are non-important questions. Not an emergency. However, in each case, I'm blocked from further action (or risk angering her when I buy the wrong things, come home late). It's frustrating to be standing at the grocery store, give up after two minutes, and then get a text when you're in line that X >> Y.
This is, frankly, one reason I really prefer using Facebook Messenger -- it's easy to send a thumbs-up response if I don't feel like typing, and I can respond easily on my computer rather than having to pick up my phone.
Totally agree that it's very controlling and somewhat selfish to expect quick replies. 30 minutes is just an arbitrary line waiting for a misunderstanding or argument. Face-to-face and phone calls are different. If it's important, call. If it's not, I'll get to a reply when I'm free or not interrupting someone else I'm actually communicating with IRL.
But isn't expecting your spouse to answer your call immediately being "control freak" as well? Who do you think I am to answer your call, a Slave? Seriously, this s*it has gone to annoying levels. Expecting timely response to time sensitive questions is just expecting the other person to have some basic "mobile etiquettes", not an intent to control them. Not all questions are life-or-death critical, some just needs quick response. "My friend is asking whether you'd like to come to dinner at his place tonight". A simple "Yes", or "No" would suffice. Calling for every such thing is actually much more time consuming for both parties involved (though that's the last option).
Most of the people might approve what you saying, but it is also reasonable for people to expect response when you are "in a conversation". For example, would you ever do it when I'm talking to you on the face and asked "So what are the plans for tomorrow?". Do you expect one to stay there staring at your face while you acknowledge that you have received the question but don't "feel like" answering it right away, even though you have time? Technology, in a lot of ways mimics physical life.
You have to understand that the other person might have taken time out of his/her busy schedule to have a chat with you. And when you not busy but just don't feel like responding, it's reasonable for them to feel offended as admit it, no one likes to have a quick conversation when every response is after half an hour.
The easiest, non-offensive way to do that would just to drop a quick message telling them that you'd get back to them (when you are able to give a few minutes of undivided attention to them). That's all, and no one should mind it then. But if you never feel like having any realtime conversation with anyone at all, then may be there are communication issues :).
> For example, would you ever do it when I'm talking to you on the face and asked "So what are the plans for tomorrow?". Do you expect one to stay there staring at your face while you acknowledge that you have received the question but don't "feel like" answering it right away, even though you have time? Technology, in a lot of ways mimics physical life.
I think it's important to acknowledge that, while technology mimics physical life in a lot of ways, it does not replicate it. The medium of conversation matters and should be considered. For example, no I wouldn't stare at their face until I felt like answering it, but I also wouldn't say, "Dear John, thank you for your question.." as I would only do that in an email. Likewise, I wouldn't speak out loud a lot of common phrases I use in texts, because having a conversation through the medium of a phone is psychologically different than in-person, and I think that's the issue I was getting at. While texting, you have to be more cautious about word choice and sentence structure so that you can convey not only the message, but the tone as well, which will naturally come out in-person. 200 years ago, all instant communication was done in person. This is a relatively new field of psychology that hasn't seem to be explored due to the fact that, especially texting, is an extremely new form of communication.
IRL convos are very different than online ones. If it's not important enough for a call, taking time "out of a busy schedule" to text also requires letting the recipient take time out of their busy schedule to reply. People really need to chill out when it comes to messaging. The recipient's time and reasons for responding when appropriate are just as valid and important as the senders time. Dropping a quick busy reply sometimes works, but also interrupts a persons flow. It's much better if a sender just has the proper perspective.
Like I've said elsewhere, there's no built-in contact state that effectively communicates whether the person you are trying to reach is in normal work hours or they're with their family and only expect to be contacted in emergencies. It is a huge cultural problem, but the solution is technical: bring back away messages. It worked for AIM.
I dislike contact states personally. They are mostly noise. People set them, don't set them, forget they set them, had some program set them etc.
For me it is fairly simple - usually texts in my company are higher urgency, location agnostic, communication. Only reason I would text is I need someone sooner than they see an email/Lync message, but I don't need them urgent enough to interrupt with a call. "I'm running late from this meeting, can we delay?", "you ok for lunch in 5?" etc. people typically respect that rough, unexpressed, protocol.
Away messages wouldn't hurt but that's not what the GP is talking about. We receive dozens of messages and notifications, we shouldn't have to feel we should be dropping everything we're doing to respond just because it's during "normal work hours". This expectation used to common with email, and maybe still is in some companies, but we've slowly come to accept email as what it is - asynchronous communication. Mobile notifications and chat applications are a step back in this respect.
"We receive dozens of messages and notifications,"
I've been "on call" for a while before, and part of the solution is to deal directly with that. Anything app that thinks it has the right to pop up notifications whenever the hell it feels like it (and why is "3am" so often when they feel like it?) better have a setting to undo that easily found, or they're in for a rude uninstalling. Anything else that thinks it gets the priority interrupt had better be prepared to discover it doesn't.
Because I need to save that priority interrupt for the actually important "site down" notice. I was getting a visceral twitch whenever I got a text because having the same alert for "CARTHAGE IS BURNING PREPARE TO SPEND HOURS FIXING IT YES I KNOW IT'S 2AM" and "hey whats up dude" was not working for me.
I'm not on that call anymore, but I've kept the habit of keeping everything away from that level of interrupt. If it's that important, pick up the phone and call me. Provide social proof of its importance by putting your own attention into the conversation. (Which, of course, can only be done by a real human.) Otherwise, you're not that important and you can deal with a delay.
If you're a distributed remote company with people who prefer to work early and others who like to work late, all in different time zones, what are "normal work hours?"
Also, I work I higher education, where things move slowly. Although we don't have an assumption that after-hours emails will be replied to until the next business day, any delay of a day or more can cascade to far more delay on the other end(s).
It's more than a technical problem. It requires a mindset change. Even if I'm Available, I can still be in the middle of a task and rather respond later - or perhaps think about how I want to respond. Also, by not responding immediately, it trains the sender not to expect instant replies. Contact states always introduce other issues.
What issues? By "training" the person that contacts you it only affects their relationship with you, and has to be clarified for everyone you're in contact with. Some people will assume the rules that apply to them are the same for everyone else, unless you plan on explicitly defining your preferences to prevent misunderstandings.
- Privacy/InfoSec
- Forgetting to change status
- Meaningless status states (Away was never really that accurate or meaningful)
- Extra messaging friction
I've found that it's usually just a few certain types that expect instant replies. It doesn't require too much time for them to get that I respond when I can. The same rules do apply to everyone, but I'll deliberately delay responses at times so as not to feed the expectation of the reply-needy. With email, I have set times to review and reply.
> If someone really needs you they will pick up the phone and call you. It’s that simple.
I actually never feel the urge to respond quickly to a text message. I treat it as the asynchronous platform that it is. Phone calls on the other hand are way more intrusive than text messages and I hardly ever answer any call because of it.
Eventually all communication mediums will be expected to be instantaneous and synchronous. It happened with email, it happened faster with SMS because everyone expects you to have your phone up your ass at all hours of the day.
What really sets it apart is the robustness & cleverness, IMO. While delivery is not guaranteed, it's generally extremely reliable even with awful connections, and from what I remember it piggybacks on an existing communication channel meaning it was a "for free" extension of the original network.
It's really frustrating to be physically at a business speaking with an employee, only to have them pause our conversation to take a phone call. I really wish more businesses would use SMS.
Phone calls on the other hand are way more intrusive than text messages and I hardly ever answer any call because of it.
... which is an infuriating habit and a huge impediment to work.
E.g., Your job has run away with our timeshare. Your email program is closed, you aren't signed onto IM, and you blithely ignore your ringing phone. I have to file a service ticket, summon support from ten timezones away, and it gets killed in a half hour. Or if you picked up the phone, you could have killed it in ten seconds.
E.g., We are having a discussion about a critical decision. We wage email wars back and forth for days, each getting more disturbed that the other is completely misunderstanding some key point. Or if you picked up the phone, we might have easily sidestepped the miscommunication and reached an immediate understanding instead.
If nothing else, a voice on the phone humanizes you more than Times New Roman 12pt, which reminds people they are working with other humans- and that in itself can nip issues in the bud.
May be I'm one of those 'kinds' being talked about in the article, but I really don't understand the people who totally ignore phone calls. On one side, they wouldn't answer messages thinking if it's really that urgent people will call. And when they do get a call, they deliberately ignore it, and are not even courteous enough to send a message saying "I'll call you back". That's all it takes. An acknowledgement message saying you'll call when free. But some people don't even do that, and whether you agree or not, for me that signals "communication issues".
I ignore calls from some people, and I lazily answer texts. This works for most people, they get that if it's not important and time sensitive, they can email or text and I'll get around to responding. And if it is important they can call. But some people insist that every little concern they have is urgent and when they learn that I don't respond to texts immediately, they start calling for everything. The way I see it, these people aren't respecting the importance of a phone call, so I screen their calls.
Calling me is literally ringing a bell and demanding I speak to you this instant. If you ring this bell for something that doesn't actually need my immediate attention then you don't respect my time and I won't give it to you.
I give others this respect, I almost never call anyone unless it's an emergency, and if I want to speak to someone I wait until it looks like they're not occupied. To me this seems like respect, but I'm open to the possibility that I have communication issues.
Sigh... Kind of OT but I'm reminded of an old client of mine. He would routinely send feature requests and bug reports over SMS. At the start, I'd interrupt whatever I was doing and log it in the appropriate place, but after the first few weeks of this, it started to get pretty disruptive. I didn't trust myself enough to remember to go back through my texts later and catch everything from the messages.
So I drew a line in the sand and explained to him that those things needed to go to email, so that I could deal with them at an appropriate time and not worry about losing them. This seemed to work well at first, but then every email was immediately followed by an SMS: did you get my email? The first few times, I interpreted that as "I sent an email a few days ago and didn't hear back" so I'd frantically go check my email and see the message: sent 2 minutes ago.
I don't miss that client. Eventually the solution was to ignore him on SMS entirely. Well... Eventually the solution was to fire him as a client, but that was for other reasons.
You can definitely see the effect of this within development teams too. I remember one specific exchange where a developer sent "X is broken" to the whole team, pretty much all of whom immediately read it and then started wondering how "X got broken." A minute later the OP sent "Oops my bad, typo." What is the cost of a two minute interruption for an entire team, or of the broken concentration, which probably lasts longer than the original interaction did?
Ha. I OC'd [corporate instant messenger] a 200 strong team (all, added to an OC a group, think corporate MSN, we sat next to each other, but nothing like this had been done before in our office) an open question "What does it make to be a strong [business line role]?"
It was quite fun seeing OC completely wipe out, but much more fun getting answers.
Even as connections were being wiped out due to latency, as being asked to hijack desks that still had connection. Some really insightful stuff that was irrelevant for anything 'in hand' but yet relevant, and that didn't usually come back through formal channels.
But, absolute OC wipe-out.
Some answers that came back were quite embarrassing, for all. It led to good things.
We bill $120 hourly. If the client CC the whole team on a problem, the whole team is going to take time off their current work to read the email. (5 mins * 6 workers) They are then going to reply to the message (2 mins * 6) and then investigate (10 mins * 6). A manager is likely going to step in and manage the team (30 mins). Finally, one developper is going to fix the issue (1 hour) and all the other developers are going to require getting back in "the zone" (average of 11 mins *6).
That's three hours (or $360) wasted for an email that should have been properly sent to the product manager or to the support team. If the client do this every week and nobody notice it and educate him, he is going to waste thousands a month of the project's budget.
What are you proposing? That when the client don't use the proper channels, we simply do the work for free?
We pride ourselves on how close to the client we are. If there is an emergency, they can email the team 24/7 and they will get a response. That doesn't come for free. If the client abuse of it, so be it, but they better be able to pay the bill at the end.
Approximately zero most of the time - and potentially hours of productive work. I really like this comic for it's accuracy and I've shared it with a few project managers at work so that they'd leave me alone.
A 10 second interruption is enough for me to lose 10 minutes of my time. Have twenty 10 second interruptions in the day and I've lost over 3 hours of productive time. Interrupt an entire team who potentially lose 10 minutes for that 10 second interruption and across a team of 10 people you've potentially lost 30 hours of productive time.
Less meaningless distractions is better.
Would you enjoy a book if I interrupted you every 3rd page for 15 seconds?
We're not discussing geological timescales here. All the teams I've worked on lose a lot more than the couple minutes after an all-hands "something's horribly broken! whoops, my bad" panic.
But if you're truly 10x like the HN community, that adds up to a whole 20 minutes of developer time! Adding this among an entire team adds up to hours.
One of the best and simplest changes I ever made was to have my phone on airplane mode by default. Originally, the change was just to maximize the life of a dying battery, but even after I replaced the battery I discovered that I was happier, more focused, and less stressed when I only checked my phone 3-4 times a day. Essentially, I treat it like I treat email.
Everyone who knows me knows that I do this and I have told them that I am not going to change. For emergencies, they know the people I usually see each day and know to call one of them.
I've discovered that when people can't expect to contact you on a whim at any time, they think ahead and let you know what their plans are in advance. Both parties can then arrange their availability in advance and use their time more efficiently.
After a year of doing this it makes you realize just how absurd and artificial the expectation of continuous availability is. My attention is a resource and I am going to control how I allocate it, not others.
I have a phone for a reason. It isn't to send telegraphs. I don't carry my phone with me to work, because people who need to get in touch with me have my work phone number and I live a few minutes away from the office. If your ego is so fragile that you need realtime validation of your thoughts, then we aren't going to get along. I'll keep on doing what I'm doing because it works for me, and I hope you find people who are willing to spend all day looking at their phone. I'd rather see everything else around me.
As someone deeply entrenched in a mobile workspace I tend to ignore a lot of txts because they aren't important. If they were important the person that's texting me would go through the proper channels and write up specs, etc for me instead of blasting a "WE NEED THIS NEW THING ASAP!" style message. Those texts get ignored and I send the person a Hipchat message stating that they must go through proper channels or NO work will get done.
Writing the specs takes about 1-5 minutes and allows the developer to have a clear path to work from.
This is an issue of boundaries on the receiver's side. Other people's unreasonable expectations are not binding on us. Otherwise we quickly become enslaved to everyone else's whims, which is no way to live and certainly no way to succeed at anything.
This is simply a matter of training people that you interact with. If you treat your own time as valuable and don't immediately respond to everything, eventually everyone else will come to think of your time as valuable also.
The trick is to never respond immediately on media that you don't want it expected from. It has the random reinforcement effect attached to it, so if they get you once, they'll always expect it.
Great post. This resonates with me because too often others expect a quick reply. I have read receipts disabled due to that mentality and won't use a messaging service that uses them without an opt-out option.
I hate read receipts and disable them where possible too. A pet peeve of mine is people who demand read receipts in Outlook. There is no way I'll ever send that person a read receipt.
An expectation of instantaneous response, combined with the pathetic verbal throughput of typing text on a glass screen. So many things that would be easy to say out loud are not worth typing on a phone screen.
I didn't like talking on the phone much but texting is so much worse in so many ways.
I have been arguing for contact states for years. You should be able to set conditions like the old IM status messages - "away," "in a meeting,","family time,"etc - that limit your reachability and optionally notify people that you won't be notified of their messages (until a certain time, if scheduled).
This was (naively) my first iOS app attempt before I realized this is something that has to be done at the OS level. Please, Apple, "Do Not Disturb" was a step in the right direction. Finish the job.
Like some of the commenters, I don't respond to text immediately and not just when driving. This behavior of mine is made worse by all these new IM apps like telegram, hangouts which provide notifications on whether I have read it. If for some reason, I try to reply immediately and change my mind midway, the IM app shows 'xx it typing..' to the other party and now it's too late to back out.
When I receive emails and texts or anything for that matter, I try to get back to the original sender quickly. I expect others to do the same. People who violate this I treat on a case by case basis. If I know your life situation (i.e. you are always checking your phone - you are unemployed) and you are unable to get back to me within a couple of days let alone 24 hours, then to me this strongly indicates flakiness, or lack of respect of my time. However, if you are a busy individual with job, family responsibilities and you are unable to get back to me within a couple of days then I will cut you some slack.
Ultimately, however, I find myself gradually mimicking the behavior of my contacts. If you always take your time to get back to me, then I won't see you as a priority and if we are 'friends' or 'romantic partners' then the relationship will gradually erode due to this. However, if you get back to me in a timely manner, you are always on time for appointments and you always let me know beforehand that you are not going to keep an appointment then I will put more effort than I would otherwise into trying to maintain the relationship.
Meetings, movie, recreation, ... coding in the zone ? Take your pick. But you might not wish to interrupt what you are doing right not any further. (But still keep a lookout for urgent things.)
I can think of a few situations. You're in a meeting and your phone buzzes. You can quickly read the message without being rude, where typing a response would be considered rude (at least in my office). I'll often do this to make sure it isn't something important that needs immediate attention.
This also applies to driving. It would be unsafe to type a response, but reading a message in my opinion is fine. Similar to glacing at a GPS.
My Motorola V60i has an led indicator as well as a preview screen so sometimes seeing that I have a message or actually seeing part of the message is unavoidable.
