The one change that worked: I set my phone to ‘do not disturb’ three years ago

Late to the party, then. Most people I know went on silent a decade or more ago.
Oh and while we are at it, notifications are for important things I need to know, not for fucking ads. Any app that uses notifications for ads gets deleted.
- Been on silent for over a decade too, but in an outlier and friends phones are so damn annoying.
- Good for you. Unfortunately that's not the case with most people, or else it wouldn't be an article
  
  Yeah, it IS good for me. Sorry you're only just now figuring this out. Meanwhile techies sorted it out 15 years ago.

I've been activelly managing my mobile phone pretty much like that since the 90s because after getting my first mobile phone I quickly figured out that if allowed to the thing just turned into a source of near-constant urgent non-essential alerts, in other words, unnecessary stress.
Decades ago, I learned about the whole 4 quadrants thing in management: https://www.testprepchampions.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/4quadrantstimemanagement-1024x768.jpg
You're supposed to work mostly in the "Important Non-Urgent" quadrant as much as possible and mobile phones if not properly managed constantly pull you to the "Not Important, Not Urgent" which is the worst quadrant to be working in.
In this perspective the problem with mobile phones (and e-mail also to a great extent have a similar problem) is that all notifications/calls look equally important from the outside, so you have to stop doing what you're doing to check them because they might actually be stuff from the "Important and Urgent" quadrant, but unless you tightly manage it, most of them are not, not least because, if you push back on it hard the people who constantly work in the "Non-Important, Non-Urgent" quadrant (i.e. those who are bad at managing their own time) will make that your problem too.
So what do I do to manage it so that my phone is not a source of stress:
Calls to my phone for work subjects outside work always (this is important) get a "I'll talk to you when I'm back at work". You have to inflexibly refuse to handle work stuff outside work otherwise the number of work calls will just creep up. Also do it from the very start of a new job: your work colleagues need to be trained to expect that from you and you need to provide them with an actual positive out (i.e. "I'll talk to you when I'm back at work" and actually do it). If an employer needs you to provided out of hours support, that has to be in the contract and there has to be a work phone just for that which will be ON during the hours contracted for that and OFF otherwise.
Call to my phone for work subjects during work time get triaged and non-urgent or non-important stuff get's back a "I'm busy now, I'll talk to you about this when I have the time" if I indeed have something more important or urgent on the plate. Again, train your colleagues to expect that if they call you with non-urgent or non-important stuff there you will not be giving them that sweet feeling of having dumped the problem on somebody else - the objective here is not to "deny service", it's to as much as possible have other people do the triaging for you so that you're only interrupted by things which are worth it.
E-mail is for non-urgent stuff: when I have the time I'll look into it. On my phone E-mail arrival notifications will be turned off. Again, work colleagues need to be trained by you to expect exactly that from you. Be organised yourself and have regular "check e-mail" times - this is part of getting other people do the triaging for you.
All application notifications default to OFF. Very few ever get turned ON and if they abuse it they get turned OFF on the settings. The sending of a notification by an application is a choice of whomever is the maker of the app, hence follows their choices and generally serves their purposes, which means that most application notifications are in some way or another a marketing choice, either directly some kind of sales pitch or indirectly to "remind you of that app", which means they're most definitelly neither urgent nor important. Only a handfull of applications deserve to have notification enabled IMHO, and sometimes even some of those abuse that and stop deservings it.
TL;DR - Triage things so that you're as much as possible spend your time doing Important Non-Urgent things (You go after the non-urgent to reduce the number of things that through doing nothing about it whilst they're not urgent, go from potential problem into "Oh, shit everything is burning!"). Activelly segregate contact channels based on the triaged level of subjects. Train your colleagues from the start to expect just that (i.e. that e-mails don't promptly get responded) and always push back from the start against misuse of contact channels (i.e. non-urgent non-important stuff coming via phone gets a response along the lines of "I'm busy with more important stuff, so send me an e-mail about that and I'll look into it when I have the time"), so that essentially other people will be triaging that stuff for you before they even contact you. As for smartphone Apps, by default assume that notification sending is driven by Marketing considerations of the maker of that app and hence are neither important nor urgent (personally I default to notifications OFF for most apps).
- This is interesting because I very deliberately try the opposite. My top priority is always making time for helping colleagues. Most of my industry is super green and the young staff require a lot of training/attention if you want them to develop well/quickly. It means when I first started my team things were a bit hectic, but years later it basically runs itself. I always prioritize investing in individuals so that when things pile up I've got 20 people I can delegate to. What's more, this is cultural at this point so they all do the same. It's basically a positive feedback loop at this point where things just sort of work cause everyone knows what they're doing.
  There is another team next to mine that is run a lot like how you're describing and they are constantly missing schedules/going over budget/having quality issues cause the lead 'doesnt have time right now'. Except right now is all the time and none of the staff seem to know what they're doing and are all super frustrated.
  Anyway, all that to say I think how you structure these kinds of things depends a lot on what kind of work you do, what kind of team environment you have, and what your overall goals are. Could I be individually more productive if I told everyone else to go away? Absolutely yes, I'd get 3 times as much done, but the team overall would be less efficient.
  I also don't work outside work hours, and neither does anyone else on my team because we're efficient enough at work to plan out and execute 40 hours of work per person per week. The same can't be said for that other team where the lead goes home and everyone else is left confused working crazy OT.
  Your way seems to work for you, but I think it is important to note that there is no 'right' approach for all situations. One needs to define the objectives and then determine what the best approach for accomplishing those might be for that particular role. In short, it's complicated. And anyone who says it's not is generally trying to sell something
  
  I did that when I started (I am, modesty on the side, a natural at what I do for work) and the result was that I became the top problem-solver of my team and over time I had more and more load from people bringing me their problems whilst still being expected to do the formally allocated work, with the end result that when I left that job I was working very long hours, always tired and my productivity had plummeted.
  What was happenning there was that, because of me always saying "yes, I'll help you" with zero pushback, I became the easiest path for people in my team to quickly solve their problems, and that was including problems they could solve themselves. Also my effectiveness at doing anything fell massivelly because whatever I was doing, in the middle of it I would be interrupted (which has quite the cognitive cost due to interruption of the mental state of Flow and "mental context switching") and if I immediatelly went into solving that new problem I would likely be interrupted at that too (leading to multiple things hanging half-way to done and making my delivery speed overall worse), and even if I wasn't interrupted serving the latest interruption the mere "stop this task, do something else equally complex, then get back to the original task" increased the probability of mistakes in the original task because of the possibility of losing track of important details of the work I was doing in it.
  Human beings are naturally lazy (myself included) and if, because you offer no pushback, coming to you with any problem is easier and faster than trying to figure it out themselves, people will tend come to you with their problems before properly after little or no effort to solve it themselves, which might be doable (though not good for them or for you) if it's only one or two people, but not when it's more than that.
  If only to avoid becoming the minimum-effort-path for everybody else and/or having your efficiency drop because of not enough single-task focus and too much context switching (and the entire team's efficiency fall compared to them solving all the problem they can solve themselves), you have to do some pushing back.
  You aren't hired to do the work of others and neither are you hired to underperform because you're in constant firefighting mode even for things which are unimportant or not really burning, so immediate response to any demand on your time from somebody else is pretty much the most amateurish, least professional way to do your work for anybody which is not a junior-level professional.
  That said, if you're lucky enough to be in a situation were you empowering others to work better is recognized and desired or, even better, you're expected to and have officially time to be a mentor, then you can relax the pushing back: you still should triage the urgency of your response to things to match their actual urgency - that's just basic competence at organising your time and work - but you can now when approached by somebody with a problem dedicate some time to teach people to help themselves (literally have them sit down and explain how to diagnose and fix it whilst they do it themselves) both so that they don't constantly come you with simple problems (which isn't really the value added stuff you're being paid a Senior level professional cost to do) and for them to grow as professionals, and if you're mentoring you'll want to go further and periodically sit with the junior types and do overviews of things or help them out in planning how to tackle a complex thing they're about to start.
  Still, in all this, you have to plan your time and triage access to you time based on urgency and importance in order to mantain good performance and actually deliver results in a predictable way, So as to best fits the needs of your employer: for any employee beyond junior level, good time management (which includes the priority of your response to queries and problems match the importance and real urgence of them) is just simple professional competence and since the triaging itself is a time cost (quite a big one if it breaks you out of Flow and forces a mental context switch), you want it done in the most effective way as possible and by the more well informed about the important and urgency of the situation as possible, which means most of it should be done upstream and before getting to you.
- Thanks for bringing up the quadrants. I've been aware of them but feel like I haven't been using them optimally to figure out how to best focus my time and energy. Somehow I didn't realize important/non-urgent was the primary one to focus on...
  
  Well, as joel_feila pointed out, people tend to be forced to, at the very least, work in the Urgent and Important quadrant because that's what one has to give top priority to, no matter what (and part of the work of triaging the demands on one's time is to make sure one doesn't miss or delay things from that quadrant because of too many Non Important stuff interrupting one's work).
  However you want to try and get yourself in a situation were Non-Urgent Important stuff is what you do most, because amongst other things by tacking potential problems in Important domains before they become Urgent, you have a lot more space to do it properly, something which in turn avoids further problems due to one's half-arsed solutions for Urgent not working anymore of breaking easilly when touched.
  In summary, Non-Urgent Important is the ideal, Urgent Important is what gets top priority, Non-Important is what you do when there's nothing in the other 2 quadrants to do.
- 7 Habits?
  
  No idea. I learned it from a manager who went into a management course, was taught it and not even a week later was back in full reactive mode treating any new thing coming in as Urgent Important even when non-urgent or at least non-important, as she had been doing before going to that course.
  Let's just say she was a lousy manager.
- Mostly workong in the important but not urgent. Ill let the er staff know that. Lol
  Joking aside i do get it most of the time things sould not get to the urgent and important box.
  
  The whole point of triaging incoming demands and doing all you can to subtly train the people upstream who are already informed of the importance and urgency of something to only get it to you in a way that interrupts your work if those things are indeed urgent, is exactly to create and maintain the space that lets you address most things in the Non-Urgent Important quadrant before they transit into the Urgent Important one.
  If you don't have "thinking things through" and "maintenance/tweaking" time you're going to get a lot more fires and a lot more of the fires which start small grow into full-blown fires before you spot them, all of which just turns into a feedback cycle were all that urgent firefighting means you don't have time for preparation, prevention and detection, which in turn creates more fires and more small fires growing hence you have to spend more time in urgent firefighting.
  To be honest, in my entire career I have never managed to, in a specific job, pull out from a "constant urgent firefighting mode" to a "mostly steady mode of work with an urgent fire having to be fought once in a while": making it happen has always been a case of me starting a new job and bringing in best practices from the start, so that by the time I'm finished with learning the environment, and integrating with a new team, and am working full speed, I'm keeping things under control. Doing it from the start of a new job is often possible because in my area (Software Engineering) people aren't expected to hit the ground running at full speed (since you have to learn the installed codebase and integrate with the team) so there's a lot of leway when starting a new job which you can use to set expectations from the start and to justify the extra time it takes to actually get a decent work process in place.
  As I've written somewhere else, I've actually managed to bring over and use the Dutch style of working in a British Finance environment (which is hectic and prone to shoot-from-the-hip management and firefighting) to yield better results (faster and more predicable deliveries, were the work I made was better matched to user needs and had fewer bugs) than most of my colleagues and did all this working 8h/day rather than the 10h+/day they did.
  IMHO, the process works, and I believe that's the merit of the process rather than being a "me" thing.

I disable notifications for most of my apps anyway, but the neural connections are still there and hard to undo. Breaking them is a long process in my experience... or maybe I reinforce them too much still.
- Bro ya need to use your neuralizer

Theres a "do not disturb at night" option on all modern phones nowadays for people who dont want to become unreachable
- And you can configure certain apps or contacts to be excluded, at least on Android. I assume iOS can do the same.
  
  True, one of the first thing I did on my phone, set to DnD from 22h to 7h,except for phone calls and SMS from known contacts.
  
  iOS also has a nice feature where if you get called by the same number twice in a short period of time it will let the second call through.
  The pessimist in me knows it’s just a matter of time until robo callers figure that one out and start double calling, but it is nice peace of mind for now.
- Please don't tell anyone I know about this feature.
  Here's how my next family gathering would go if I were in the movie Liar Liar:
  "Son! We never hear from you anymore! It's so hard to get ahold of you these days!"
  "Yeaaaaah........"
  "Everytime I call, there's never any answer, and your mailbox is full."
  "Yeah. I've intentionally kept my voicemailbox full for the past 3 years. Then I turn the ringer to silent, as it has been for 10 years"
  "Why?"
  "Well, I love all of you, but it is EXAUSTING to talk to most of you for more than 30 minutes, and not very often. If you notice, at Christmas, and other holidays, I tend to flutter. I don't want to spend any more than 15 minutes with any one of you, so when you start building up your bs, I flutter to the next person, and the cycle renews. Look, I know my niece is only 13, but she better start dating by 15, and have a kid by 18. Look, BEST case scenario, I don't get to play retro video games with a kid seeing them for the first time for AT LEAST 8-9 years. And that's assuming my niece grows up waaaaaaay faster than I expect her to. She may not have a kid until she's 30! I'm not going to be the cool uncle in his late 40s, spending time with the kid, so he feels included.......I would be the weird uncle in his late 60s, trying to show his great nephew novelty video games from 80 years prior. And at that point I lose my buffer! Ok, I'm sorry. I would absolutely prefer to play video games with a kid I talk to once a year, and show him games of the past, than have to go have "grown up conversations". Which roughly translated means hearing my boomer mom get progressively more openly racist, which historically was NEVER the case, and my boomer dad become increasively more peaceful, and accepting of others, and less racist......which is even MORE surprising! Because before Obama, he would not hesitate to throw the n-word around casually. So basically I don't understand life right now. Then you got my sister, who I feel I should feel guilty for thinking she's a bad person....but I don't. She belittles anyone, even those close to her. She loves to argue and make those around her feel bad. Then there's my other sister who used to be this social animal party drinker when she was in her 20s, and now in her 50s she loves judging people, and gossiping about the neighbors or whoever. Again, historically unlike her. Then there's my brother in law, who I feel like is the reason my sister turned from free spirit to mean judgy type. And then there's his parents, who aren't bad people at all. His parents are salt of the earth people. They're just really really......boring in every way. Finally there's my niece. She's 13, so she's in that self awkward phase where she doesn't talk to anyone and somehow gets away with it. Maaaaaan, just a few years ago she was my buffer! I played untitled goose game with her, pokemon with her, some driving game.......now she stays in her room and avoids everybody! Lucky...."
  And then everybody would look at me and stare. Everybodys feelings are hurt. So instead I just say
  "Heh, yeah. I get a lot of telemarketers these days"
  I swear to god, their dog better live like 30 years. She LOVES me everytime I come over. And she gets super excited and energetic. So I'm just like "I'll Maisey for a walk!" And my sister is like "It's 10 degrees, and blizzarding out there!" And I'm like "So does she have little doggy boots, and maybe like a sweater with overlaying wind breaker....orrrrr......what are we doing? Is this like a pulling her on a sled situation?" And she'd say "No there's no doggy boots or sweaters, or sleds!" And I say "Well, I mean that's kind of cruel though, don't you think? To take her out in this without protection from the elements?" And she says "I WASN'T GOING TO TAKE HER OUT AT ALL!!!" and I just say "Woooowwwwwwww! Hear that Maisey? I'm the only one who loves you enough to take you for a walk. C'mon, we get the old wagon, and at the very least a blacket!"
  And then leave the house for like.....45 minutes to an hour.
  Look, I love my family. I just don't have the social stamina to interact with them.
  Edit: Oh, and if you've never seen Liar Liar, the concept is this guy (jim carry) has a spell put on him where he can't physically lie. So instead he just blurts out the cold hard truth. Go watch it. It's good.
  
  Thanks for sharing, it really did feel like a sketch out of the movie.
  I guess I would also focus on the dog and the niece when they are more approachable and not as combative and so many people in your family are changing quite profoundly
  I hope you have a lovely day without phone calls!

Own your notifications or they will surely own you.

I've had mine on vibrate for years. Texting doesn't trigger it, only calls. It's been great. I look at my phone only when I'm ready to look at it.
- Yeah same here, and I haven’t missed it a bit. As a downside, I constantly misplace the thing and have to search for it when I hear the specific rhythmic vibration somewhere. If anyone had something extremely urgent, they’ll be able to call my partner or neighbor or something. And I do check the notifications daily, too, so Im never completely out of the loop.
  I’ve noticed, also, that I’m much better at actually answering the phone or answering messages. Former since I so seldomly get any noticeable feedback from the phone, so it feels fine to grab it and answer if it rings and I happen to notice it. The messages, because I read them when I have time, so then I also have time to answer. I used to get messages and read them and I’d be in middle of something, so I’d just think to myself “I’ll reply later”, and I very rarely remembered and actually did.
  It feels counterintuitive, but I’m not complaining. Life is much more peaceful. I get all the busy notifications and contacts and news and all that on my own terms, when I’m ready, and it feels great not to be disturbed while I’m working or cooking or whatever.
- Hmm maybe I should try this
  Not sure how I can accomplish this. All my texts and calls are through signal and I still want notifications
  
  I use signal too, exclusively apart from sms or the rare iMessage my grandparents send. It’s been fine. I can’t recall if it was app setting or it just works(tm), but I get no sounds, and still get notifications so I can check them when I have the time and energy to deal with all that.

Am I the only one that just ignores calls and texts that I don't want to respond to immediately or ever? I never have my ring volume up and I've muted almost all of my group chats, so only individual messages get through. My Pixel also does call screening which blocks a lot of trash from getting to me, and I keep space in my VM for when I have important calls get through that I either can't or don't want to answer.
- Ignoring a text that "I can answer later" is actually what hits me with most cognitive charge :
  My current balance is :
  To never give notification permission except when it is necessary for the core goal of the application.
  Automatically enable do not disturb from 11pm until alarm clock.
- You have a GOOGLE phone?!?! Does it notify ICE when you’re near an immigrant? JK
  
  Google hardware is actually solid. Just don't run Google software.
- Yes, me too. My phone is always silent and with Do Not Disturb on. Only few family contacts can get through, and only with a phone call.
  I don't even know what's the sound of the notifications of my phone. It's blissful.

Seems a lot of comments are arguing about this as if it's an all-or-nothing. I use a dumbphone (for many reasons), but even it allows me to configure DND settings to allow certain phone numbers to audibly ring or vibrate. Surely smartphones can do the same? I find being with someone whose phone is constantly making noises to be very irritating--and more so if they interrupt our conversation to check it every time.
My not-so-dumb flip phone also has 3 indicator lights on the closed cover -- red if battery is low, a green envelope if I have a message or other notification, and a blue phone if I've had a call (even those can be disabled). So I don't have to touch it or do anything other than glance in its direction to know I have a message. "Smart" phones can do such simple things as this, can't they?
- I have my phone set to DND at all times, and I can confirm that you can allow certain notifications to come through. Only important notifications and calls from contacts come in. My peace of mind improved quite a bit with this change.
  
  That's good. Some of the comments were making me wonder!
  I think some people may not realize how detrimental it can be to their quality of life or stress level, to have something constantly interrupting their attention or that it's something that can be controlled without having to completely cut themselves off.
- I miss blinkenlights on smartphones. They went out of style circa 2015, and now all you get is the screen turning on momentarily, or some variant of a dim always-on view that wastes battery.
  
  They don't blink except for the red one when it's charging and stops when it's full. The notification ones are solid. Yes, they are really nice to have!

Headlines like this are annoying AF. You wouldn't want your doctor keeping their phone on DND 24/7.
Edit: I didn't expect people to need examples, but here you go, something that happened to me few months ago:
23:21 - my IP phone rings, I'm literally about to go to sleep but I set this specific type of call to come through. I recognize the number and I know it's an emergency so I pick it up. A patient's family calling about them being in their local ER and the ER physician is about to pull the plug on my patient. I spend the next hour yelling at the ER physician to do his fucking job, frantically arranging a transfer. Next day afternoon, I'm having a full conversation with my patient in our hospital. If I didn't fight for this person, and let this go through the regular channels, they would have died.
My comment isn't primarily about work culture or work/life balance. There are some calls that you take because it's the right thing. Advice from people who claim they can turn off all notifications just tells me two things, 1) they don't know how notification scheduling works 2) they aren't the kind of people that others ever rely on in an emergencies.
- No you do not.
  You don't want an incredibly tired person prescribing treatment for you or, worse, operating on you, unless you have some kind of death wish.
  You want a proper call rota with the doctor "on call" and only the doctor "on call" to have their work phone ON and be available during their on-call hours.
  That idea of yours would be perfectly fine if it was just you, but it isn't: it's you and all other people who think like you (or if they start by not thinking like you, they'll change their minds when they see others who do think like that get prompt service whilst they themselves do they not).
  That logic just leads to people who if they make a mistake can kill you or give you a problem for life (by prescribing your the wrong medicine or, worse, cutting the wrong thing whilst operating) being very tired and hence way more likely to make mistakes.
  Having a single professional having to be on call 24/7 is very much a Tragedy Of The Commons situation - fine if only one or two people used that availability only for very urgent problems, a disgrace for everybody when lots of people innevitably use that availability for any shitty shit little thing.
  
  That idea of yours would be perfectly fine if it was just you, but it isn’t: it’s you and all other people who think like you
  Definitely not an "idea of mine". That's the US experience (I'm a doctor here). The US's most common electronic medical record system developed a secure messenger app that replaced pagers so yeah for outpatient work most of the time-critical messaging goes through your cell. So no, I can't be on DND 24/7. (I do have very aggressively tweaked work/personal/etc notification settings, but sometimes the urgent messages do need to come through after hours)
- Your doctor has a work phone that is available only during hours.
  
  if they are doing outpatient work, they don't. even worse, the paging systems migrated to cell phones.
  sauce: am doctor

I appreciate that Android changed from an opt-out to an opt-in model when it comes to notification permissions, but it's still not enough. I can't believe the mobile OS world became so much worse than actual computing. What a corporate hell scape.
- Tbh not surprised. In 2012 I got my first smartphone, it ran Android. At first I thought it was just like a PC. Within half an hour I was fed up at how useless it was.
  Can't even open a terminal window and apt install apache, what a load of junk.
  Tried a pinephone and that is almost perfect but it struggled with SMS. If that was more reliable I think it would be the perfect phone.
  
  Same. My first "smart"phone was a Nokia N95 and I had so much excitement back then Then I realized: hey man, I can't actually do anything that I need to do on this thing.. But at least it takes really nice photos?

I’m probably a nightmare to get hold of at a moment’s notice – and should never, ever be someone’s In Case of Emergency, much to my partner’s chagrin.
Any phone will allow you to still receive notifications for select contacts or numbers that call repeatedly in a given time frame with DND on so she's chosen to not be directly contactable by her partner or be his emergency contact. I would be offended by that if I was in his shoes, especially considering they have two young children.
- I had to scroll too far for this. If your child is a school and there's an emergency, or your husband gets into an accident, or a million other very important things. You'll just get back to them whenever? This seems borderline neglectful.
- I keep Do Not Disturb on most of the time and my wife can contact me at any time. Her and a few others are flagged as exceptions.
- Most allow you to also nominate VIP contacts that always get through, he should dump her

I can't emphasize how important it is for you to control your phone, especially notifications. Every notification is literally a mind hijacking attempt. Regardless of the type of notification, it's something that disrupts our thinking and our flow.
Some of them are necessary—but most aren't.
All the native apps will of course try to get as much permission from you as possible, including notifications. Don't allow this permission freely.
Get really strict about which apps need to send you notifications, and when. Take it from a dude who used to give free reign to all apps for notifications.
Once I started thinking in a more digitally minimalistic way, it made a huge difference. Running GrapheneOS actually helped with this a lot. But you don't need GOS to do this and feel the difference.
I got some notifications turned on, but most of em are silent. So they still get delivered, but they're not time-sensitive. They'll be there when I check my phone next. I don't need em interrupting whatever I was doing or thinking.
TL;DR: Be strict about which notifications you allow, and when. It'll do wonders for your thinking, productivity, and mental health.

I love scheduled and automation based DND, except that about twice per year, SOMETHING SOMEWHERE updates and causes my alarm to be silenced by DND, despite having my clock app exempted from every possible silencing mechanism I can find.
For the life of me, I can't understand why that would ever be a useful behavior, let along default one.
Lucky for me, I have a pretty robust internal clock, but Holy Fuck is that annoying.

I just turned off notifications for everything, except Signal and banking apps. Most convenient solution IMO.

I do this to my mom as a way to be very low-contact with her. It's a huge relief.
I used to love texting when it was only a handful of friends but these days I hate the pressure of it being ever-present in my pocket and the social expectation to answer in a relatively timely manner. (This has led me to being a horrible texter, sorry everyone.)
I miss the old days of AOL instant messenger. Your online status did all the heavy lifting to communicate when you had some free time and felt like chatting.
- Your online status did all the heavy lifting to communicate when you had some free time and felt like chatting.
  A lot of modern messengers implement a similar feature but I disable them or manually set it to "away" perpetually. Using DND makes much more sense. I just tell people they can message me literally any time they want but I will not see or respond to them until later.
  
  Very different these days. The beauty of the status bubbles and messengers of past is that you would catch each other when you both had time and desire to chat and then you'd have a back and forth conversation until one of you disengaged. You also almost never have people sending offline messages. It was more akin to an in-person interaction where you're either visibly there and someone can approach and talk to you in real time or you aren't.
  Texting is generally of a blend between real-time messenging (but you can't tell if they're available) and short form email where everyone interacts differently and has their own ideas about "proper" etiquette. It's probably somewhat cultural but in my experience, people just use messaging apps in the exact same way as they would text, so status bubbles don't mean much.

I have been using scheduled do not disturb for over a decade, it makes SUCH a difference. I always have it on 10 PM - 7 AM, and I have started enabling it for an hour if work picks up or if I’m at the gym so I can focus.
My work phone is on DND more than not, I’m available 7:30 AM - 5 PM on weekdays and it is in DND otherwise, super nice.

I ignore any calls that are not from my contacts. If it's important they'll leave a message. I have DND on at night. Calls and messages from my wife have separate sounds and exception from DND.

Wow. Don't change the setting back! Never!!
Or your phone would be blocked forever with downloading all these missed notifications...
;-)

This should be the default on new phones. I enabled it the first time I got a call at 3AM from one of my clients. Many people just have no respect.

All my phones have always been on DnD, I don't even know how my ringtone sounds.
- Mine is currently the intro to Give Me the Night by George Benson, in case anyone wondered.

I did a similar but more generalised thing since long ago, when I got my first pager (pre-mobile) in '95. I made myself a solemn promise that I would gratuitously and unapologetically use silent-mode, DnD, etc (including more recently auto-DnD every late-afternoon-to-mid-morning, even on weekends, when it became a thing) to live an almost exclusively asynchronous life. I almost never answer direct phone-calls too, often even for many of the recognised numbers. My modus operandi is this:
If it's a real emergency a call might be unavoidable, but if it's just typical-urgent it could be an SMS (key part of that acronym is Short) which I would see relatively soon. Alternatively a sensitive/private urgent requirement could be fulfilled via Signal. Otherwise email (pgp-encrypted if it has to be private) which I usually catch up with every day or two. Also I disable all non-critical realtime app-notifications entirely. Additionally whenever someone calls/emails me with an "opportunity" requiring "immediate response because they need a confirmation by yesterday!!!!1" I know that means the work is going to be like that too (absent time-management or time-discipline, bouncing between crises in parallel) so my go-to response is along the lines of "Thanks, but such a shame it's so last-minute - it would be impossible for me to properly consider this against the rest of my schedule and decide responsibly whether I could do it. I hope you find someone."
I didn't choose that for the sake of being antisocial, I chose it because I felt that "flow state" and "focus-retention while tackling complex problems" are extremely precious resources, and also increasingly rare. Most (not all) of the time if you don't push back to protect that then others won't voluntarily protect yours for you, because a lot of people only respect their own time, mental-bandwidth and priorities, and not those of others. I found that batching tasks together to grind through them in bulk without interruption is not only useful at work, but in most of the mundane/administrative parts of life too, because it minimizes the destructive effect of context-switching.
I discovered a very astute validation of this in an essay by Paul Graham "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule" https://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
- I kinda do this. I've found that I drift away from everyone. I don't respond in real time. I don't want to interrupt anyone for idle conversation.
  Not sure I'd really recommend, but I can't seem to help drifting away from people. Only people in my life are my wife, kids, and people my wife keeps in my life, which includes my own folks.
  It's lonely when I stop to think about it. Which mostly I don't, but when I do.... it sucks. And I think I'm accidentally raising my kids to be the same way.
- Smart man.

I mean, you can set DND to be on at certain times so that, short of an emergency that is sent tagged as such, you won't get notifications during certain hours of the day or night. Y'all don't need to get all bohemian self righteous with the whole "I've disconnected from the world through my phone and have never looked back". Seriously, get over yourself. We all have our crosses to bare and DND is a great feature for some "leave me alone" time but there's no need to become a virtual hermit in order to have some peace and quiet.

imagine being the emergency contact for loved ones and responsible for small children and elderly, and just ghosting them in a clutch because you cant be bothered to configure your notification settings. fuck your life.
- At least on Android (I'd assume iOS does it as well), you can set Do Not Disturb (DND) to turn on and off automatically, based on the time. You can also designate certain contacts to be allowed to bypass DND, so the phone will ring normally. I setup DND a long time ago, because I don't want to be bothered by random shit while I am trying to sleep. However, my job is such that I might reasonably be called at 03:00 and need to roll my arse out of bed and start working. So, the number they call from is set to bypass DND. My elderly mother and brother are both similarly set to bypass. It all works out quite well and if some random marketer figures out my number and calls in the middle of the night, I don't get woken up to talk about my car's warranty.
  
  Also Android has an option to allow numbers that call you twice in 15 minutes to get through as well, which they would do anyway if there is an actual emergency, and someone is really trying to reach you asap.
  
  there's also a settling somewhere to let a call through if it's like the second of two in a row
- Yeah, they solved that over a decade ago. Both iOS and Android let you override DnD for contacts and or repeat callers.
- Energy contacts can ring anyway after 3 calls or something on iOS. I guess Android has the same setting.
- Ok
- Call 911 ffs, I can't do anything.