Don’t call me, baby

Why my phone is always on Do Not Disturb

June 22, 2023

I’d be nearly unstoppable if not for the fears of abandonment and inadequacy instilled in me by the man formerly known as my father. I’ve gotten pretty good at remaining unfazed by the little things that can pile up throughout the day, and even major upsets can feel minuscule when my coping skills are fully operational. That said, those defenses are easily disarmed by anything that brings about the same feelings he did.

A few years ago, that entailed any conflict in relationships and hiccups in my work that made me fall short of expectations. Thanks to countless journal entries, therapy sessions, and nights crying over sad movies about dads, I’ve whittled down the list of triggers to just a couple things. Mostly, it’s interactions with anyone directly related to my story’s overarching villain. Since I blocked him in 2019, those interactions have been nearly zero. Then my sister got married.

In the month leading up to the wedding, I role-played every potential confrontation. A small and naive part of me wished for a heartfelt apology for at least some of the damage he caused, but mostly I hoped he’d be self-aware enough to keep his distance. In any case, I was perfectly fine avoiding the chat altogether. So, immediately after the ceremony, I tucked myself between my uncle and cousin hoping that would stop my mother’s ex-husband from seeing me.

Shortly after making it towards the nearest outdoor heater, I heard an unfortunately familiar voice shout, “Jordan! Good to see you!” It was, of course, not good to see the man behind my deepest insecurities and fears. As he went in for the hug, I blurted out a quick, “Ah! I think we’re good with a handshake!”

For the first time in my life, I’d left him visibly shaken. After he took a second to scoff at me and gather himself, he and my youngest brother turned and walked away. Just as they got out of arm’s reach, he let out his classic “wow, unreal” to let me know that he, like me, can be unfazed by the big stuff.

It finally clicked that he hasn’t changed in the three decades I’ve been alive, and will always nonchalantly pretend that nothing happened. I could finally start moving forward on my own, but I would have rather avoided the interaction all together and the frustration, self-doubt, and sadness that came after. If real life had a Do Not Disturb mode the way my phone does, we’d all be better for it.

Don’t ring the alarm

I keep my phone on Do Not Disturb at all times. It can seem rude to signal to the world “I’d prefer to be unreachable,”—and several friends have called me out for always having my notifications silenced—but I simply hate pings of all forms, and get overwhelmed by constant notifications. 

I check my phone frequently enough that I rarely miss anything, but I’m not forced to break concentration if I don’t want to. If I don't do this, things like an important-but-not-urgent message showing up on my wrist while I’m trying to write an email to my boss can throw me off track and it’s not always easy to get back on. This is the only way I’ve been able to triage things on my own terms without missing too much (and learning to own it when I do).

Some things truly are important enough to disrupt my work. Even in Do Not Disturb mode, I let a few things through, both in case of emergency, and in case I forget to switch to my work focus and need my task and calendar reminders to keep me on schedule. To figure out which things I should probably block out, I dove into my phone’s Screen Time to see how much time I really spent on each of my favorite apps. If I don’t want to be spending that much time on it, it should probably get filtered out.

In both iOS and Android’s settings apps, you can create exceptions for apps and contacts that you want to still trigger notifications even in Do Not Disturb. I stay pretty strict with this—what’s the point if I still let things persist and disturb me?—and limit it to messages and calls from my mom and sister, plus alerts from my calendar app because I’m always prone to forgetting a commitment. I even disable notification badges, because every red bubble is another thing for my mind to fixate on instead of the task at hand. Clearing those bubbles is rarely an urgent matter, despite that vibrant red hue telling me otherwise.

That last part might seem a bit drastic, but eye-grabbing notifications are an infinite well and my attention span is a shallow pool. So short of switching full-time to a distraction-free phone, this is the closest I can get to keeping my phone handy as a tool when I need it without turning it into a 24/7 way for friends, brands, and telemarketers to get a hold of me. Without such a strong filter, I’d never get anything done, even the fun stuff.

Take some space

In a perfect world I could keep my phone perpetually in Do Not Disturb and it would never inconvenience anyone or leave me out of the loop. My utopia doesn’t seem to be arriving anytime soon, though, so I’ve turned to Apple’s Focus Modes (basically custom versions of Do Not Disturb) as a way to create notification and app filters based on when things actually do need to get through, though DND is still my default.

I have a work focus that allows all calls (in case a doctor’s office needs to get a hold of me), texts from frequently messaged contacts, and apps that I need to keep an eye on while I work like Slack and my to-do list . Outside of work, though, those productivity apps are always silenced. I also have a reading focus that shuts out all notifications aside from my timer that keeps track of how long I’ve been reading, and a workout focus that only shows notifications to tell me about milestones on my bike ride, or when to start my next set.

For these modes, I have timers enabled so they only trigger during specific hours (like for my Work focus), or when I manually switch from iOS’s Control Center. For all other cases, my phone remains in Do Not Disturb and I remain as close as I can reasonably get to unreachable without burning any bridges.

I’m currently experimenting with a home screen that’s strictly Siri suggestion widgets, which has actually worked out pretty well, but iOS’s Focus modes also let you assign custom home screens to each mode. It’s a lot of work to fine-tune them all if you use different apps in each focus, but if that works better for your brain than an iron-clad fortress to block out notifications, it’s worth the effort.

If going completely dark seems drastic to you, maybe the reverse approach will work better: build focus modes for the various things you do throughout the day. Have a personal focus for letting all your chats and calls come through, a work focus for hunkering down, and so on. Then, use Do Not Disturb as a last resort to shut the world out. Whichever you choose, it’s important that you allow yourself to check your phone on your own terms and create your filters in a way that facilitates that, rather than keeping you on constant Notification Defense.

📚 Good Reads:

Apple’s Journal app needs to read the room (The Verge): I’ve long been a fan of journaling apps, and ahead of Apple’s WWDC Keynote a few weeks ago, the rumors that they’d be announcing their own had me excited, even though there’s little at this point that could take me away from my app of choice, Day One. The more I think about it, though, the less excited I am by a journaling app powered by machine learning. As Victoria Song notes, there’s more to life than the joyful moments we want to log: 

People don’t only take photos of happy things or moments that spark joy. If your camera roll is like mine, it’s a jumble of happy, serene, infuriating, vain, mundane, and melancholy moments. It’s messy because life is messy. And if the Journal app truly takes a page from Apple’s Memories feature, there’s a good chance it’s going to tactlessly ambush you with memories you either don’t want or aren’t ready to see.

For me, journaling is a way to process the good, the bad, and everything in-between, free of judgment or unsolicited advice. I’m perfectly fine chatting with my journal about my messy, frustrating, emotional life, but it has to be on my terms. Maybe one day, Apple’s machine learning will be smart enough to tactfully display things in a photo widget or journaling app without hitting our soft spots, but maybe it’s also fine that not everything gets beefed up by AI. We don’t need a computer to tell us what’s on our mind, or what we need to get off our chest. 

The Vision Pro is the perfect gadget for the apocalypse (The Atlantic): This year, a lot of my time has been focused on how I can stay connected to the digital world while remaining connected to my surroundings. It’s difficult, but with things like Do Not Disturb for filtering notifications, and my Apple Watch for checking things that might be urgent or for quick interactions that don’t require me to pull out my phone, it’s been manageable. As Charlie Warzel puts it, Apple’s recently-announced Vision Pro presents a shift in the relationships we may have with our gadgets going forward: 

There’s a final-frontier vibe to it all—total sensory colonization. But it’s also a rather depressing turn away from Apple’s previous vision of its products. Historically, the company has marketed its transformative products as tools that help users navigate the world. In sleek promotional videos, iPhones and Apple Watches aren’t just intermediary screens: They propel people through life and enrich it at every turn. Maps, Siri search, calendar apps, and other features support the idealized, highly productive “Apple Man” as he lives efficiently and presently in his daily life. The Vision Pro’s proposition is different. It beckons its user to turn further inward. It is not a tool meant to help navigate the physical world: It is a way to tune it out.

🌐 Just Browsing:

❤️‍🩹 A gorgeous essay about the anger our fathers can leave us with, and the challenge of letting that go 📺 The new season of Black Mirror isn’t quite like previous seasons, but its focus on looking back doesn’t make it any less eerie, and it has some of my favorite episodes to date 📝 Think of your notes app as a place for your ideas to die, but you can always resurrect them when you need them 🎧 Tuning out our surroundings can be useful, but it shouldn’t be our default state 📚 On how audiobook narrators play the roles of author, text, and reader 📵 Leaving social media alone won’t make you happier, but it certainly won’t hurt 💬 I’m a firm believer that subtitles make viewing better, but there’s a reason some streaming services are harder to hear than others, which is news to me! 🧹 If you’re struggling to come up with your own positive affirmations, check out this Roomba’s personal list 📈 Going viral isn’t always a good thing; sometimes it’s best to not post, even if it’s just about finding a bagel 🍲 The Instant Pot was too good for this world 📶 Why every phone should be a flip phone  🔎 SEO is exhausting, and it’s ruining the web

🔧 Toolkit:

👥 From the team:

  • I wrote a lil’ explainer on IP ratings and what they tell you about the durability of your gadgets

  • Also, I have some new thoughts on my favorite robot vacuum

  • Medea wrote about Google’s new AI shopping tool, which lets you virtually “try on” clothes to see how they’ll actually look on you

  • If your curly hair makes wash days a chore, Medea recommends this bonnett attachment

💕 And now, here’s something we hope you’ll really like:

Executive dysfunction is a key component of my ADHD, and it’s one of the main reasons I struggle to get started on anything (work projects, personal projects, chores, etc). I’ve found that breaking tasks down into smaller steps can help, but even that can feel daunting when I don’t know what those smaller chunks are. I recently came across the AI-powered app Goblin Tools while scrolling through TikTok, and it’s been useful in helping me turn tasks into smaller actions that seem more manageable and less daunting. 

Here’s how it works: simply type in a task, like “publish next newsletter,” and rank the difficulty of it. Then press a magic button and watch the app do its thing by breaking down your task into easier chunks, like “brainstorm a list of ideas” and “pick one idea to write about.” It makes the task at hand seem less like a mountain and more like a small hurdle to leap over before jogging to the next one. It won’t get your to-do list done for you, but it’s a handy way to relieve some anxiety when your work feels like too much before you’ve even started. 

As always, if you have any questions, feedback, or just want to say hello, feel free to drop me a line on Twitter.

My thanks to Medea Giordano for editing this issue.