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?
My kids baseball (littlest league) got cancelled yesterday for rain.
All communication is done via group chat.
While I appreciate the message itself, I didn’t need a notification and a chime every time another parent sends a 👍.
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.
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
If you’re on iOS setting up profiles would work. I have work, driving, and do not disturb. Each one allowing/blocking specific notifications
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.
