Slack, the chat app for workplace collaboration, has the ability to display an away status like “on vacation until Monday.” It’s effective at stopping people from sending a message. But you still have to manually select a response.Īpple’s and Google’s text messaging apps would benefit from a much simpler tool: the away message.Īmerica Online Instant Messenger, one of the earliest online messaging services, from the 1990s, had a simple autoresponder with a memo that users could use to tell people why they were unavailable. Google’s messaging app has a so-called Smart Reply tool, which automatically generates possible responses to a text message, including one that says you are busy. Yet every notification for a new text message adds to a to-do list to respond to someone. “I don’t want my friend on the East Coast to not send me some funny meme because I’m asleep if it’s not going to wake me up,” he said. He said that he understood the intent behind Apple’s Focus but that he agreed it was too cumbersome to set up. Santamaria, the former iPhone engineer, now runs Future, a messaging app for people to talk to fitness trainers. In my experience, even when my Focus setting tells people that I’m not receiving notifications, they text me anyway. Setting up each Focus profile is time-consuming, and it requires effort to schedule a Focus to activate at certain times, or to remember to toggle the feature on or off. My problem with Focus is that it’s overly complex. In a work profile, for example, Focus can be set up to let text and phone notifications arrive only from colleagues anyone not on the approved list gets a message that notifications aren’t being received. Yet the tools are ineffective.Īpple’s iOS includes Focus, a tool released last year to manage how phone notifications appear in various aspects of our lives, including at work, at home, when we’re driving or heading to bed. To minimize the likelihood that we will be bombarded by texts, Apple and Google have added layers of settings to tell others when we are busy. “It should be something that everybody should have and not have to worry or think about,” she said of the need for a universal private texting service. Texting is also not the most secure form of communication, especially in a post-Roe era when privacy is more important than ever, said Caitlin George, a managing director at Fight for the Future, a digital rights advocacy group. “That’s something over the past three years everybody has struggled with, and it’s playing out on your home screen.” “Where does your work end, and where does your personal life begin?” said Justin Santamaria, one of the iPhone engineers who developed the iMessage app more than a decade ago.
Texting invites us to intrude on other people’s time. Since texting typically takes only a few seconds and is widely considered the most urgent, attention-grabbing form of digital communication, it’s difficult to set boundaries around texting with our colleagues and friends. The pros of text messaging can easily turn into cons.
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