Who is responsible for ensuring that text messages aren’t disruptive?

I’m old enough to remember a time when the only options for communicating with people were telephones, face-to-face conversations, and postal mail.

Times have changed. According to a Gallup poll conducted a few years ago, “sending and receiving text messages is the most prevalent form of communication for American adults under 50.”

If you’re going to call someone on the phone, you want to be sensitive to what time of day it is where they are. Calling someone early in the morning or late at night was considered rude; a late night call typically was bad news or an emergency.

But text messaging follows a different rulebook.

The Main Feature of Text Messaging

A fundamental difference between phone calls and text messages is this:

People send messages at the times that are convenient for them.

This is a feature of text-based communication, not a bug.

What text-based communication is good for, and what makes it increasingly popular in a global, 24/7 world, is that it bridges a gap by allowing for the exchange of ideas and information where participants are not available in the same space of time and/or location.

In other words, it offers convenience. You can send a text message whenever you want, without having to schedule a mutually-convenient time.

Another fundamental principle at play in text messaging is that you cannot control when people send you messages.

The Challenge of Timing

A natural challenge of text messages is that the time that is convenient for the sender isn’t always convenient for the recipient. Incoming messages can be disturbing if they arrive too early, too late, or other inopportune times.

This issue recently came up in one of my group chats, and it led to a little back-and-forth on this question:

Who is responsible for ensuring that text messages aren’t disruptive?

To be honest, I didn’t realize this issue was ambiguous. I thought the answer was obvious, clear, and settled as a matter of social contract. But apparently, it’s not. So let’s make it clear.

The Burden of Preventing Disruption Falls on the Recipient

The answer is clear: the burden is on the recipient, not the sender.

Sure, it would be nice if people didn’t send text messages at an “unreasonable” time — by most definitions, “too early” or “too late.” But it’s not always realistic or practical.

A sender must be able to safely assume that if the recipient does not want to be disturbed by the ping of new messages, the recipient has taken action to prevent that disruption.

Here are 3 reasons why the burden of preventing disruption falls to the recipient:

(1) What’s “Reasonable” Varies

First, who decides what’s “too early” and what’s “too late?” Reasonableness is a murky standard, even in a court of law. Even for two people in the same time zone, one person may be an early bird and the other might be a night owl. Your view of what’s a “reasonable” time may vary based on the type of message or who it’s from. Perhaps you typically don’t welcome messages after 9 pm, except if it’s from a friend you haven’t connected with in a long time.

There’s no way to predict what a recipient will find intrusive.

(2) Time Zones

Second, globalization and increased mobility in our work and leisure activities makes it hard to sync up times.Even if we’re talking about your closest friends, for whom you may have a clear sense of what times are generally ok or off-limits, you may now know where they are.

I’ve been moving around so much this year that sometimes I don’t know where I am.

If you do know where they are, you still have the challenge of coordinating time zones.

My clients and friends live around the world; when I communicate with clients who live in China, I routinely receive messages in the middle of the night for me, and I send them messages when it’s the middle of the night for them. The beauty of text messaging is that I can keep them informed about developments without having to coordinate a time to speak by phone.

If you’re in a group chat with people from enough locations around the globe, it is almost impossible to restrict your messages to times when nobody might be disturbed. There is never a time when someone isn’t sleeping, or working, or doing something else where they don’t want to be disturbed by the ding of the text message. No time is “safe.”

(3) Disruption May Be At Any Hour of the Day

Third, there might be other times outside of “too early” or “too late” that aren’t convenient for the recipient to receive a message.

It is noble — and enough of a challenge — to be mindful of when other people may be sleeping, but sleep isn’t the only consideration. There are many times outside of sleep when we might not want to be disturbed by the ping of a text message.

Should I expect someone to know when I’m in a meditation session, at the gym, in the middle of teaching a class or coaching a client, sitting down to work, or doing anything else where the ping of the phone would be a distraction?

Of course not.

Recipients: You Have Power Here

Of course, the constant ping of messages can be a huge disruption.

Although it’s certainly nice when senders can be mindful of when their message will arrive, it’s not always reasonable or practical to plan messages in a way that will avoid disturbing others.

If you have an expectation that the person sending you a message must be more considerate of what time of day it is, you will spend a lot of time in suffering and victim mode.

The good news is that you can control whether incoming messages disrupt your sleep or other activities. You have the power to protect your space.