Batch Your Messages

Episode 87: Batch Your Messages Welcome back to Get Deaddicted. Today's practice changes how you handle text messages, direct messages, and email. We are going to batch everything. Instead of reading and responding to messages all day long, you will check messages at specific times, respond in batches, and then close the apps until the next checking time. Here is the principle. The expectation that humans should respond to messages within minutes is a recent and damaging invention. For most of human history, a letter took days to arrive, and people responded when they had time. The phone made that faster. The smartphone made it constant. Now, an unspoken cultural assumption has built up that messages should be answered within fifteen minutes, sometimes within five, and that taking longer is a small breach of social contract. That assumption is wrong, it is bad for you, and it is bad for the people you message with. The constant interruption to respond destroys focus, fragments your attention, and trains everyone in your life to expect a level of responsiveness that no human can sustainably provide. We are going to opt out. Here is the practice. Pick three windows per day for checking and responding to messages. Roughly mid-morning, after lunch, and early evening, for example, but pick what fits your life. Each window is fifteen to thirty minutes. During the window, you go through every messaging app you use — texts, WhatsApp, Slack if you have to, email, social media DMs — and you respond to everything that needs a response. Then you close all of those apps, and you do not open them again until the next window. Outside the windows, you do not check. The apps are closed. Notifications are off, as we established way back in episode sixty-one. The phone does not interrupt you. Your attention belongs to whatever you are actually doing. This works for almost every job and every life, with very few exceptions. Most people, when they audit their own message volume honestly, find that almost nothing in their messages was actually urgent. The vast majority of texts and emails could wait three hours without any negative consequence. The few things that are genuinely urgent — a sick child being picked up early, a family emergency, a critical work deadline — almost always come through as phone calls, and phone calls still get through to you, because you allowed them through Do Not Disturb. The benefits are immediate. Your day becomes about ten times more productive, because you stop being interrupted every few minutes. The work you actually want to do becomes possible to do. The conversations and meals and walks you participate in become full conversations, meals, and walks, because you are not half-checking your phone the entire time. Your nervous system -- 53 of 85 -- relaxes, because the constant low-grade alertness to potential messages stops. The interesting thing is that nobody around you really notices. They send you messages. The messages get answered, often the same day, sometimes within a few hours. Almost no one tracks the exact response time. As long as your replies are thoughtful and not delayed by days, people experience you as responsive. They just experience it as a healthy kind of responsive, where the reply has substance, rather than a frantic kind, where the reply is half-formed. For colleagues at work, this practice may require a small social adjustment. If your workplace expects immediate response to Slack or email, you may need to set expectations explicitly. Tell your team, "I check messages at ten, two, and four. If something is truly urgent and cannot wait, please call me." Most reasonable workplaces accept this readily. Many find it improves your performance so noticeably that they encourage others to do the same. For close family, you can use a workaround. People who genuinely need to reach you in between windows can call. The call breaks through. Your spouse, your kids, your parents, your closest friends can call if they really need you. The phone is not unreachable. It is just not constantly responsive to non-urgent message traffic. For email specifically, this practice is often called "inbox triage." Open the email app, read every unread message, respond to anything that needs a response, file or delete the rest, close the app. Twice a day. Maybe three times for some jobs. Never first thing in the morning. Many of the most productive people in the world handle email exactly this way, and they get far more done than people who check email all day. There is a deeper practice underneath this. You are reclaiming the right to determine when you are reachable. The expectation of constant availability is a form of unpaid labor, performed for everyone who might want a piece of your attention. By batching, you are saying, gently but firmly, that your attention has shape and limits, like everyone's used to before phones existed. You are available, you are responsive, but you are not constantly available, and your attention is not free for the taking. A specific tip. When you sit down for a message window, set a timer. Twenty minutes for triage. Then close everything and walk away. The temptation, when you are inside the messaging apps, is to linger, to chat, to spiral into a conversation that eats an hour. The timer holds you to the actual task, which is responding to what needs responding to and then getting on with your life. Most people, after a month of batched messaging, never want to go back to constant responsiveness. The peace is too good. The work is too much better. The relationships, which they feared would suffer from slower replies, actually improve, because the replies are more thoughtful and the in-person time is more present. They look at people who are still checking their phone every two minutes and feel sad for them. That was them, a month ago. -- 54 of 85 -- This is episode eighty-seven. Batch the messages. Take back your attention. Tomorrow we walk without the phone. -- 55 of 85 --