I dont know about others, but sometimes I am not able to check my phone, or be fully present in a conversation that I’m part of. Maybe I’m concentrating on work, or driving, and not able to look. It gets distracting when my phone is constantly buzzing and chiming for 5 minutes straight. Muting the chat can help, but if you forget to check it, or get added to a new one, you can’t really do anything about it. I just want to be able to get notified once that the chat has new messages, decide how I want to react, and then move on from it. Is that too much to ask?
I just set group chat notifications to silent.
I still get a notification that’s easy to spot in the tray/bar, but it doesn’t play sound or vibrate, so it’s not distracting unless I’m already looking at the screen.
I just have my phone silent at all times. I might miss a call once in while, but I don’t get many calls anyways.
If you’re on Android, BuzzKill can set your notifications to “cool down”, so if you get multiple within a short time, you will only get buzzed again once a set amount of time has passed.
Android has this built in, under notifications set the minimum time between notifications.
I bet you use an iPhone, right?
Nope. I have an android. I just downloaded an app called buzzkill from a recommendation. We’ll see how well it works out for me
Buzzkill is great, but although it mutes the notification sound, if you’re listening to an audiobook, it mutes that every time there’s a silent notification! Fuckin annoying
I wrote to the dev and he said it’s an Android system thing and there’s nothing he can do about it
Good of him to reply though!
Ahhh, what app are you using for messaging? I would be interested to know how Buzzkill works for you. I use Tasker to customize mine a lot, but a formal solution might be worth trying if it’s good.
I’m using the default messages app on my Google phone. The biggest source of my annoyance is every iPhone user adding reactions and such, which act like a new message for me. So any group chat may as well be a fireworks display of sounds and vibrations when it is active. I’ve only set one rule to cool down on messages for 5 minutes and it’s already made an impact.
The app lets me make specific rules for each app, but I don’t see a way to do a rule per group chat, which would be ideal, but this is already an improvement
I think that’s a good idea, my solution is to mute group chats and check them when I’m free, but it’s not ideal for the reasons you’ve mentioned.
In whatsapp there’s only the option to mute the chat.
In discord there’s granular level of control that allows me to mute everything but direct notifications (@d00ery).
But if you implemented such a feature, how would you limit it?
i.e. one notification for the first message and then mute all replies for 5 mins? What happens when that one person who always replies an hour later messages?
Could we use AI to check if the conversation is still related to the original message?
From a dev perspective there’s all sorts of solutions but I wonder how would one find the sweet spot.
Although it might feel like it’s really important to stay on top of messages outside of those concentrating times, it really is not. Set your own terms for when to read messages and silence your app altogether.
“But what if I miss out on…?”
Don’t let fomo control you. It will awkward at first wanting to check constantly, but you’ll find that in reality you don’t miss much if you check once or twice a day.
