How To Disconnect Without Annoying Your Friends And Family | Cal Newport
Chapters
0:0 The texting dilemma5:10 Acute stress
10:16 Batch check messages
00:00:00.000 | Why do you use your phone too much?
00:00:02.040 | Most technology critics will say because social media apps are very addictive.
00:00:07.340 | But there's another thing on those phones that keep pulling you back, and that is texting.
00:00:13.280 | If you think that your family or your friends or your coworkers are waiting to hear back
00:00:18.080 | from you on their latest message or emoji that they sent your way, you are going to
00:00:22.180 | feel very compelled to pick that phone up again and again and again.
00:00:26.300 | What I want to do here is play a clip for you from an episode that first aired over the
00:00:30.680 | summer where I tackled what I called the texting dilemma.
00:00:35.440 | And what I'm going to do in this clip is I'm going to break down exactly why social expectations
00:00:39.860 | around messaging makes us feel like we have to use our phone.
00:00:43.080 | And then I'm going to give you a bunch of strategies for how you can begin to increasingly
00:00:47.380 | disconnect from your device without alienating the people you know.
00:00:52.620 | I think this is really critical tips if you want to be less on your phone.
00:00:59.100 | All right.
00:00:59.520 | Check out this clip.
00:01:00.200 | I really think you're going to like it.
00:01:01.320 | Today, I want to talk about a topic that we often overlook when we discuss building a
00:01:05.720 | healthier relationship with our phones, and that is messaging.
00:01:09.580 | I'm talking texting and iMessage and WhatsApp.
00:01:13.000 | We tend to worry more about flashy apps like TikTok and Instagram into which we know that
00:01:18.760 | billions of dollars have been invested to try to keep us coming back to them again and
00:01:23.000 | again.
00:01:23.280 | And by contrast, when we think about messaging, we tend to think of that as sort of simple
00:01:28.580 | and old-fashioned.
00:01:29.400 | It's, you know, getting a note from your kid that they need to be picked up from soccer.
00:01:33.260 | It's something that we were doing before smartphones existed.
00:01:36.260 | Those apps are plain.
00:01:37.600 | They're not flashy.
00:01:38.920 | There's not a lot of money invested to them.
00:01:40.660 | And so we don't think much about messaging.
00:01:42.320 | But what if it's not actually something we can ignore?
00:01:46.160 | What if instead of being at the periphery of our issues with smartphone addiction, it is
00:01:50.120 | actually at our core, and we just haven't realized it, sort of like the digital version of Kevin
00:01:56.220 | Spacey's character in The Usual Suspects.
00:01:58.720 | What I'm trying to say here is maybe texting was Kaiser Soze all along.
00:02:03.200 | So these are the claims I want to investigate in today's deep dive.
00:02:06.260 | I'm going to let this proceed in three acts.
00:02:09.460 | All right.
00:02:10.700 | So act one, I am calling the problem hiding in plain sight.
00:02:15.260 | Now, not long ago, I came across a study.
00:02:18.020 | Jesse, I don't know if we can put this up on the screen here.
00:02:20.160 | It was published in the journal Computers and Human Behavior and was written by a group of
00:02:27.260 | researchers from the Netherlands.
00:02:28.840 | So there it is for those who are watching instead of just listening.
00:02:31.240 | As you can see, the title of this paper is sort of innocuous.
00:02:35.180 | It's called Modeling Habitual and Addictive Smartphone Behavior, The Role of Smartphone
00:02:40.000 | Usage Types, Emotional Intelligence, Social Stress, Self-Regulation, Age, and Gender.
00:02:44.500 | It featured a pretty straightforward experimental design.
00:02:48.020 | They just surveyed 386 respondents.
00:02:50.400 | But what's interesting is what they found in these surveys.
00:02:53.800 | And it's going to set up our whole discussion of texting as this sort of hidden driver for
00:02:59.200 | some people of excessive smartphone use.
00:03:00.920 | I'm going to read you three quotes from this study.
00:03:03.020 | Quote number one, people who extensively use their smartphones for social purposes develop
00:03:10.380 | smartphone habits faster, which in turn might lead to addictive smartphone behavior.
00:03:14.800 | Quote two, social stress positively influences addictive smartphone behavior.
00:03:21.740 | Quote three, men experience less social stress than women and use their smartphones less for social
00:03:28.320 | purposes.
00:03:28.740 | The result is that women have a higher chance in developing habitual or addictive smartphone
00:03:34.440 | behavior.
00:03:35.340 | Those three claims, they might be stated sort of simply, but really have in them some really
00:03:42.160 | big ideas that I want to highlight for you right now.
00:03:44.500 | Here's the first idea we need to pull from those three quotes.
00:03:46.460 | They're arguing that a big driver of phone use is not just the addictive nature of what
00:03:53.420 | you're using on the phone, but social stress, right?
00:03:57.720 | This is how this works.
00:03:58.680 | If you dive deeper in this paper, we are wired to be wary of ignoring or disrespecting other people
00:04:05.060 | in our social circles, right?
00:04:06.380 | If we go back to our Paleolithic path in which the social circuits in our brains actually
00:04:11.440 | wired, if someone in our tribe is tapping us on the shoulder, you better turn around and
00:04:17.160 | see what they want.
00:04:17.880 | To ignore your tribe members, to hurt your pair wires or what they would call dyadic social
00:04:22.360 | bonds between your tribe members puts you in danger of not being supported by your tribe
00:04:26.780 | members.
00:04:27.040 | You could be outcast from the tribe.
00:04:28.440 | Your reproductive success is on the line.
00:04:30.880 | So we take sociality very importantly.
00:04:32.980 | We're wired to be very socially aware.
00:04:37.060 | So here's the problem though.
00:04:39.700 | This means when we imagine in the modern context, messages arriving, a text message, an iMessage,
00:04:46.500 | a WhatsApp message from people in our social circles, our Paleolithic brain says someone is tapping
00:04:52.220 | on their shoulder.
00:04:52.780 | Our survival of our genes are at stake.
00:04:56.220 | We better answer it.
00:04:57.620 | And if we're not, when our brain imagines that communication from our tribe is building up and
00:05:03.900 | we're ignoring it and that this ignoring of it might be creating friction, what's the result?
00:05:07.820 | What the researchers call social stress.
00:05:10.140 | And that is an acute type of stress because we're so social.
00:05:13.840 | It's not a very comfortable type of stress to feel.
00:05:17.960 | All right, so idea number two, once you start checking your phone a lot because you worry
00:05:23.620 | about social stress, you get in the habit of using your phone for other things.
00:05:29.540 | This is a huge concept that comes out of this paper that it might be the social stress that
00:05:34.060 | drives you to your phone a lot.
00:05:35.320 | And now you get in the habit of looking at your phone a lot.
00:05:38.260 | This is what then allows those flashy apps with billions of dollars invested to make
00:05:43.320 | them really sticky and exciting.
00:05:44.980 | This is what allows them to then get their hooks in your brain and become a big part of your
00:05:48.920 | phone usage routine.
00:05:49.760 | In other words, TikTok and Instagram and these type of apps are in some sense potentially
00:05:54.680 | monetizing your instinct to be loyal to your friends.
00:06:00.160 | So for some people, the social stress from texting is what drives you to your phone.
00:06:05.780 | And only once you're there, do these other apps then become a part of your routine.
00:06:09.380 | And you end up with a more generalized feeling of smartphone addiction.
00:06:12.700 | That's backwards to the way that most people think about it, which is texting is not that
00:06:18.600 | important, but TikTok is really addictive.
00:06:20.320 | We might have that backwards.
00:06:22.120 | The third big idea I want to point out from those quotes is that women are more susceptible
00:06:28.560 | to social stress than men on average.
00:06:31.060 | This is because of just well-known differences in personality type and wiring.
00:06:34.860 | So they end up more likely to face smartphone addiction.
00:06:39.240 | In other words, there's a sort of unfair technology penalty here for being more socially conscientious.
00:06:46.180 | Men are more likely to be a little bit more loner, be a little bit more antisocial.
00:06:49.740 | It makes us a little less prone to phone addiction.
00:06:54.640 | So I think this is important because often if it's men talking about this issue,
00:06:58.100 | we don't realize that the relationship women might have to this issue could be different,
00:07:03.680 | that we might not feel the same level of social stress around texting that then causes these
00:07:08.220 | other issues.
00:07:08.840 | And advice for improving your behavior with your phone that ignores those realities is not
00:07:15.280 | going to be complete advice.
00:07:16.600 | All right.
00:07:17.060 | So those are the big ideas.
00:07:18.320 | Let's go to act two here, diffusing the social stress trap.
00:07:23.120 | Now, I call this the social stress trap, the situation I just described, because we have
00:07:27.440 | sort of these two things that are in contradicting contrast to each other, right?
00:07:33.240 | So on the one hand, it's hard for us to address or reduce other habitual behaviors that we don't
00:07:40.260 | like on our phone, sort of like the addictive use of our phone, if we feel social stress about
00:07:44.960 | messages that we're ignoring, but it's hard to avoid feeling social stress about messages
00:07:51.000 | we're ignoring unless we become significantly less social, but that could make us feel just
00:07:55.040 | as bad.
00:07:55.560 | So either we have to feel bad about using our phone too much because social stress drives
00:08:00.980 | us there, or we have to eliminate social stress, but then we're lonely and we feel bad
00:08:04.760 | anyway.
00:08:05.040 | So it feels like a trap, like there's no way out of it.
00:08:07.780 | I want to talk about some concrete ways to escape it.
00:08:11.180 | Basically, we need to find a way to rewire the social brain so that long stretches away
00:08:16.280 | from messaging apps does not create that sense of really distressing social stress.
00:08:21.200 | As you will see, this is going to be just as much about rewiring your brain as it is rewiring
00:08:27.280 | the brains of the people that you know.
00:08:29.720 | All right, let's get more specific about it.
00:08:32.080 | The concrete thing you're going to do first to try to work on this social stress trap
00:08:37.460 | is break what I call the constant companion model of phone use.
00:08:41.660 | This is an idea I first introduced in a New York Times op-ed from five or six years ago.
00:08:45.840 | The constant companion model of phone use, as the name implies, is that you have your phone
00:08:51.500 | with you essentially everywhere you are.
00:08:53.120 | If I'm at home, it's in my pocket.
00:08:54.620 | If I'm at the gym, it's in my pocket.
00:08:57.400 | If I'm at work, it's right next to me on my desk.
00:09:00.080 | If I'm in bed, it's right next to me on my bed.
00:09:01.860 | It is a constant companion.
00:09:03.320 | When it is your constant companion, it is very difficult to get away from habitual phone usage.
00:09:09.940 | So what we want to do is try to break that constant companion model.
00:09:13.100 | So let's talk about how to do that first, and then second, talk about how to deal with the
00:09:17.340 | social stress that might create.
00:09:18.620 | So the easiest thing to do is to plug it in.
00:09:20.860 | And what I mean by that is in the primary locations where you operate and have a phone with you,
00:09:26.480 | you find a different location for the phone where you plug it in.
00:09:29.060 | So when you're at home, it's like in your kitchen or your foyer, you have it plugged in in that
00:09:32.480 | location.
00:09:32.980 | When you're in your office, you have it on like a bookshelf or a chair across the room
00:09:37.280 | plugged in.
00:09:38.160 | It is not with you as a companion.
00:09:40.160 | When you're at the gym, you keep it in your gym locker, which means, and I know this is going
00:09:47.800 | to be shocking for people to go to the gym.
00:09:50.520 | You're going to have to bring a paper notebook with you to keep track of what you're doing,
00:09:54.660 | and you're going to have to have a simple music player if you want to listen to music,
00:09:57.900 | not your phone.
00:09:59.180 | You can't just sit there and stare at your phone in between sets.
00:10:01.960 | All right?
00:10:03.400 | So that's the physical thing to do, get some physical separation between you and your phone.
00:10:07.780 | What do you do about messaging?
00:10:10.420 | Well, now what you're going to do is batch check your messaging apps on a semi-regular basis.
00:10:15.820 | You should let probably at least an hour go by between checks.
00:10:18.440 | It's something you can schedule.
00:10:20.040 | At the top of the hour, at lunch, I'm going to go check and catch up on my messages, my text
00:10:24.680 | messages, WhatsApps, et cetera.
00:10:26.120 | Now, when you do this, be ready for it to maybe take more time, right?
00:10:35.080 | If you are social, you might have a lot of messages.
00:10:37.940 | You might not realize like how much you're tending to these conversations throughout everything
00:10:41.460 | else you're doing.
00:10:42.160 | So when you batch this more, it might take you more than a few minutes.
00:10:45.840 | Oh, I have a lot of messages I have to catch up on here.
00:10:48.360 | This is going to take me, this is going to take me some time.
00:10:51.400 | Okay.
00:10:52.460 | How do we then deal with the social stress situation?
00:10:57.720 | Here, I think the idea is to manage expectations and emergencies.
00:11:04.220 | So based on experience, first of all, you do not want to explain to people in advance.
00:11:11.700 | Your new plan.
00:11:12.560 | Oh, I'm checking my phone less often and here's why and I want to tell you and I want
00:11:15.820 | to apologize in advance.
00:11:16.780 | Do not preemptively apologize.
00:11:18.620 | Most people don't care.
00:11:20.020 | Some people don't know they care until you preemptively apologize and then they start
00:11:24.180 | caring.
00:11:24.540 | There's no reason to sort of waste people's time with that.
00:11:27.440 | It's also a little bit self-focused.
00:11:30.060 | People don't really care what your texting strategy is as much as you think they do.
00:11:33.940 | Only explain what you're doing if people complain.
00:11:37.740 | So if someone is texting you, hey, where are you?
00:11:40.100 | Are you mad at me?
00:11:40.780 | How come you're not responding to text?
00:11:42.000 | That's when you say, hey, you know, I've been having trouble with my phone use, so I'm
00:11:46.100 | trying a new thing where I keep my phone across the room for big swaths of the day.
00:11:50.180 | So I'm not always seeing texts anymore as they come in.
00:11:53.020 | Over time, people's expectations will change.
00:11:56.800 | If they hear that enough times from you, the small fraction of people in your circle who
00:12:00.600 | care will adjust internally their expectations.
00:12:03.980 | Oh, this is someone who doesn't necessarily see text right away, so I'm not going to text
00:12:08.360 | and expect to have an immediate response.
00:12:10.340 | They just refile that away in their head.
00:12:12.040 | There's lots of people who are in this situation, and people are completely possible.
00:12:15.900 | It's very easy for people to refile in their head your availability.
00:12:20.480 | Like I think about, like, my youngest sister is an ER doctor.
00:12:24.580 | We just know when she's on shift, she's not going to be answering her text messages.
00:12:29.160 | It's easy for us to adjust our expectations over time, and now we just know that.
00:12:34.320 | So people can adjust their expectations.
00:12:36.140 | The other thing you're going to have to do here is get better at batch responses.
00:12:41.060 | So when you're responding to a lot of text messages at once, because you're only checking
00:12:46.740 | every hour or so, you can't respond to these text messages in a way that just bounces the
00:12:51.520 | ping pong back to their side of the proverbial conversational net, and they're going to have
00:12:54.960 | to bounce it back to you, and you're going to have to go back and forth.
00:12:57.080 | If you're not going to be on your phone all the time, you have to be much more definitive.
00:13:01.760 | You have to find a way to answer a text with enough detail and options and plans that it's
00:13:05.940 | okay that you might not see their response to that for another hour or two.
00:13:08.940 | So instead of just being like, yeah, they say, do you want to grab dinner before the movie?
00:13:15.980 | Instead of responding, yeah, what are you thinking?
00:13:18.480 | Which is not going to work because you're not going to see the response to that.
00:13:22.400 | You might be like, yeah, we should definitely do that.
00:13:24.180 | Let's plan to meet like roughly at this time.
00:13:26.840 | I might not see my text again for a little bit.
00:13:30.180 | So here's my, here's a couple of suggestions.
00:13:32.740 | You choose, or we'll figure it out when we meet, let's just meet at this location at this
00:13:38.920 | time.
00:13:39.300 | And then when we meet, we can figure out the dinner.
00:13:41.380 | Like you do a little bit more time to transform back and forth into more just like, here's a
00:13:46.700 | response.
00:13:47.140 | And now we can take this conversation out of the text thread.
00:13:49.760 | All right.
00:13:50.420 | So I said, you have to manage expectations and emergencies.
00:13:52.600 | What do I mean about emergencies?
00:13:54.740 | Well, there's certain things that are time sensitive and emergency is one of them.
00:13:58.160 | You know, what if someone needs to reach you, not when you next check your phone for text
00:14:03.160 | messages 20, an hour from now, but they need to reach it right now.
00:14:06.960 | Or what if there is some sort of logistical thing going on, right?
00:14:10.320 | I need to hear from my kid when practice is over.
00:14:16.360 | And I don't know when that's going to be.
00:14:18.560 | They're just going to text me when it's over, right?
00:14:20.620 | How do we deal with emergencies?
00:14:22.620 | This is often the thing that prevents people from batching or changing their texting or messaging
00:14:27.620 | behavior as they worry about logistics, time sensitive logistics or emergencies.
00:14:30.900 | Don't let the existence of these force you back completely into a constant companion model.
00:14:37.020 | There's a couple of things here you should do instead.
00:14:40.060 | For example, set up a custom do not disturb mode that allows text from a certain number of
00:14:48.860 | white listed numbers to still come through.
00:14:51.980 | If your kid's at sports practice, you can have a do not disturb mode in iOS that allows
00:14:57.500 | their text messages to come through.
00:14:59.080 | Now, they're not going to be texting you a bunch of stuff because they're at practice,
00:15:01.720 | but their text will come through when practice is over.
00:15:05.720 | So then you can have your phone's ringer on, still across the room, but you'll hear a text
00:15:13.360 | sound when they text you.
00:15:14.280 | And it's like the only text sound you'll hear because everyone else, it's in a do not disturb
00:15:18.000 | mode.
00:15:18.260 | Do the same thing with calls, right?
00:15:21.340 | Tell people, "If there's an emergency, call me." And that really works.
00:15:26.860 | In my book, "A World Without Email," I call those an escape valve strategy.
00:15:32.380 | If people know there's a way in an emergency they can get in touch with you, you know, it's
00:15:36.900 | high friction, they wouldn't normally do it, but they'll call you if there's an emergency,
00:15:40.660 | they feel better and you feel better.
00:15:42.000 | Because you say, "I'm not taking something off the table." If there truly is an emergency,
00:15:46.480 | if my parent has an accident and is going to the hospital, people can call.
00:15:50.900 | Most people don't call me normally, but they can call on my ringer on. And I'll be able to
00:15:55.420 | hear a call. And so I don't have to worry about emergencies. So if you're a little bit
00:16:00.420 | careful, you can have something in place for emergencies and logistics that doesn't just
00:16:04.740 | let you go back to like, "I better just have my phone with me all the time, engage in conversations
00:16:09.580 | with anyone that I see." All right, so my argument is, if you manage expectations
00:16:15.900 | at emergencies, breaking the constant companion model of your phone is going to be, long-term,
00:16:23.980 | is going to reduce the social stress you feel to check it. As you get a sense of emergencies
00:16:29.900 | are handled, people's expectations have shifted over a period of a couple months, they understand
00:16:35.100 | it now, and I'm getting better at texting back to people so we don't need back and forth.
00:16:39.740 | Your social stress will die down. It will be pretty easy not to have to check the phone
00:16:45.100 | often for text. When you don't have to check it for that, it's much easier to deal with all the
00:16:49.420 | other habitual uses as well. So all of these things are tied together. All right, the third
00:16:54.300 | act of this discussion, there is a couple of nuances I want to mention. In fact, I have three
00:16:58.220 | in particular I want to mention because there is some care that is needed when dealing with these
00:17:03.100 | issues with messaging. Nuance number one, people worry, if I'm less available like this, does this
00:17:10.060 | make me a worse friend or a worse sibling or a worse child? Is it because this ongoing back and forth
00:17:15.740 | digital conversation can feel like connection? I'm in these constant conversations with people I know
00:17:22.540 | on text messages, doesn't that mean we're really connected? Our brain, however, doesn't really think
00:17:28.380 | so. We don't know what digital text-based communication is. We don't recognize that as
00:17:35.180 | social. It's not really strengthening your connection. It's just on paper you feel like
00:17:41.340 | maybe this makes me social. So the solution here is with the people you really care about,
00:17:46.540 | couple this shift away from constant companion texting with reinvesting new time into in-person
00:17:54.220 | analog interaction with that person. Yeah, I don't text all day anymore, but we should start going on
00:17:58.940 | a hike every Wednesday morning. We should have a phone call. I'm going to call you for my commute twice
00:18:03.500 | a week. We should just check in, right? You have a more analog way of communicating and you emphasize
00:18:09.980 | that. So it's like a trade-off. I'm trading off this social snacking sort of lightweight connection
00:18:14.460 | for something that's more meaningful. I'm actually going to feel more connected to people. And if you
00:18:18.620 | do that at the same time that you cut back to constant companion model that has you on your phone
00:18:22.140 | all the time, that'll make a difference, right? Nuance number two. What about extenuating circumstances?
00:18:29.180 | Something's going on where you have to be on your phone, right? There's your parent is going to the
00:18:34.300 | hospital. Your siblings are on this text thread. One is there. You're trying to handle logistics and like
00:18:38.300 | it needs to happen over text. What do you do in that situation? You get on your phone. Yeah,
00:18:43.580 | there'll be extenuating circumstances. That's okay. We're just trying to change like your normal
00:18:47.580 | relationship with your phone, your average case. Go easy on yourself. The key thing here is changing
00:18:55.100 | your relationship to this messaging. It's not like the alcoholic abstaining from alcohol, whereas you
00:19:02.220 | really can't go back to this at all. You don't know what's going to happen. It's not like that. If you need to
00:19:06.780 | be on your phone for an afternoon texting because of something that's going down, that's not going to
00:19:12.060 | necessarily make you back into a constant companion texter. You can just go back when you're able to
00:19:18.300 | to your default. All right, nuance number three. If you're a parent, this is not just about you. It's also about
00:19:26.060 | what your kids see. This is the problem with the constant companion model of the phone driven by
00:19:34.540 | texting. As you know, as the parent, what I'm doing on this phone is actually somewhat noble. I'm making
00:19:40.860 | logistics for the upcoming carpool. I'm checking in with friends. Like this is all good stuff. I'm not on
00:19:46.540 | TikTok. I'm not doing the stuff I don't want my kid doing on the phone. This is like meaningful,
00:19:51.740 | good old-fashioned, like adult communication. Your kids don't know that. They just see you're looking
00:19:55.100 | at your phone all the time. And now you're normalizing to them, regardless of what they say, see what they
00:20:01.260 | do. A phone is something to be using all the time. It's something very desirable. Look at all the
00:20:05.260 | attention it gets from my parent. So when you break the constant companion model and stop doing
00:20:11.900 | communication all the time on your phone, your kids will see that you're not on your phone all the
00:20:16.220 | time. It will be modeling to them that the phone is a thing you go and use where it's plugged in when you
00:20:20.380 | need it, but it is not a companion that's with you all the time. So this is not just about you.
00:20:26.620 | All right. So when it comes to our ongoing efforts to reform our relationships with our phone, this
00:20:31.500 | might be one of the trickiest and most overlooked areas. Messaging is a huge driver of habitual and
00:20:39.260 | unhealthy phone use. And it is so hard to shake because social stress is something we hate. But we can get
00:20:47.020 | around that if you understand what's going on, you can find ways to change your relationship to messaging
00:20:52.540 | that will over time change the expectations of the people you know. You can get away from constant
00:20:57.100 | companion checking without having to feel social stress. And if you do this, it really will, this is
00:21:03.820 | a classic digital minimalism move, will really improve your relationship with your phone. Not everyone has
00:21:08.060 | this issue, but a lot of people do. And I think it's often ignored. So I was happy to have an excuse to
00:21:13.580 | talk about it. Now, the irony of this, of course, is this entire time that I was talking, Jesse's just
00:21:19.340 | been like texting me and name things. So Jesse, I don't think you understood. I think you understood the point of this.
00:21:25.180 | I think it evolves. Yeah. Um, one thing that happens, like say you're, you're doing the batching method
00:21:30.940 | and you said, all right, in your working memory file, like text so-and-so, and then you go to text
00:21:36.540 | so-and-so, and then you see like three other texts. Is there a way that you know of, of, I mean, sometimes
00:21:41.980 | I go into the contacts, but I rarely do this, like where you pull up the contact and just text them
00:21:45.660 | as a, so you can't see other people's texts. If you're, I mean, maybe. Yeah. Maybe like batching,
00:21:52.540 | it doesn't really matter, I guess. But if you're batching, it doesn't really matter. Like the
00:21:55.160 | point is you're like, I am waiting, I'm waiting into a lot of stuff right now and I'm going to try
00:22:00.600 | to find my way to the other side. But I'll tell you what though, here's the advantage of waiting
00:22:04.120 | is a lot of stuff gets worked out before you get there. Like if I had answered this initial text
00:22:09.080 | on this text group, uh, I would have been in the mix of it, but because I waited an hour,
00:22:13.800 | like they kind of figured it out. And so it, it actually, a lot of the stuff you might not have to
00:22:19.000 | actually answer and other stuff you might just say, I'm just not going to answer it. That's another
00:22:22.280 | expectation thing is on your group threads. Like don't always answer. And it just changes the
00:22:28.680 | expectation. You chime in when you, when you can, but you don't chime in all the time. And that takes
00:22:32.120 | a lot of social stress off the, off the table as well. And then for other like non-group texts or
00:22:37.480 | whatever, do you delete texts or just keep a long thread history of texts?
00:22:41.720 | I guess I just keep a thread history. I mean, I'm bad at my phone. Um,
00:22:46.680 | I don't know how to delete a text. I'm going to say no. Got it. Probably not. Yeah. I mean,
00:22:51.880 | there's a lot of like more complicated things you can do, but I'm like, eh,
00:22:54.280 | just check it less and manage expectations and it works itself out. Hey, if you like this video,
00:23:01.240 | I think you'll really like this one as well. Check it out.