Good and bad texters

On a normal day, I’ll reply to 99% of texts within 90 minutes,
although most responses will be within 5 or 10 minutes.

I’m a good texter.

It’s a symptom of my addiction to connection at scale, and falls neatly into one of my nervous habit cycles — check messages, then instagram, linkedin, facebook, repeat.

As this chapter of my life focuses less on scale and more on meaning, I called one of my oldest friends, Boomsky, who has earned notoriety as someone who takes days to weeks to reply, if at all.

She is a bad texter.

I said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, you never reply to messages. I need to know how you check your phone so little. What’s your secret?”

She said, “I know, it’s so bad. You’re a great texter. I need to be more like you.”

It turns out, her ADHD brain struggles to get back to texts in the moment, they pile up, and then become too intimidating to tackle.

For me, it’s the opposite. I want messages out of my mind immediately, while it’s fresh.

The grass is green on neither side.

Admire those who aren’t attached to their phones.
Almost nothing is that time sensitive.

Phone calls remain my favorite way to use the phone.

I’d like make my phone work for me instead of the other way around, so I changed my phone settings to make it less fun:

→ Greyscale mode (surprisingly effective, social media is less captivating)
→ Smart invert (makes looking at some apps way worse)
→ Text notifications off completely (doesn’t show unread messages at all)
→ Added work contacts to bypass Focus Mode (so I won’t miss important stuff)
→ Turned Focus Mode to turn on automatically during work hours, and night hours

I’ll let you know if it works.