The famous cliche that happened to everyone: we meet with a friend and say, let’s agree to go out for coffee or a drink. “What’s up; Shall we go get that drink we talked about on Friday? You send it to your friend a few days later and he says, ‘Yes, um!’ today?” and a friend… follows you – no voice, no hearing, that is. A few days later he appears with the excuse that we all once said: “Sorry, I didn’t see your message in this chaos.”

And as much as this “loss” sounds like an excuse, it is a reality. Now we are bombarded with messages from everywhere: from traditional SMS to apps like Whatsapp and Viber, direct messages are now coming from everyone: friends, colleagues, our boss, companies.

Could it be that instant messaging in all its forms has taken over the role of email? Just as we once easily gave (and still give) our email to almost anyone and subscribed to the most unlikely and unlikely newsletters, so now our phone, whether by SMS or other applications, is available not only to close people . us, but into our wider circle and even goes beyond it.

Thus, having someone from our professional environment or a company that we have chosen to buy our mobile number, they automatically have us as a contact in all messaging applications such as Whatsapp, they can send us an SMS or even iMessage, for those who prefer iOS and in general, “spam” us mercilessly.

Lying is bad, whether it’s about the delivery of our order, or our boss who wants to tell us about tomorrow’s emergency meeting, or our best friend who wants to go out for coffee, everyone wants to find us as soon as possible. And how else can someone find us faster than sending an instant message to our mobile phone, which is in our hands most of the day? After all, studies conducted in the United States have shown that over 80% of users view incoming messages within the first 15 minutes of receiving them.

However, if the flow of messages is no longer manageable and the mere thought of the next notification sound gives you a headache, there are several ways to reduce the “chaos”.

unsubscribe

The largest volume of spam we receive comes from our newsletter subscriptions, mostly from companies that we have once purchased from, and in addition to our email, they also have our mobile phone number. Somehow, offers and other promotions end up in our Viber or SMS inboxes. However, with unsubscribing, you will directly get rid of all those messages that you never open anyway.

Important messages remain “unread”

Have you promised a very good friend you haven’t seen in a while that you’ll be able to say it in person this weekend? If you’re afraid that with endless midweek information you’ll forget your promise, and if you’ve always had an iPhone, soon, with iOS 16, you’ll be able to select messages in Apple’s Messages app and show them as unread. . Thus, they will appear first in the message list. If every time you open messages you see the last “unread” message sent to you by your friend, you won’t have an excuse.

Set filter

Strong proof that messages are new emails is the fact that both iOS and Android now allow you to filter messages. Thus, you can divide your mailbox into categories, for example, from known senders, from unknown ones, as well as divide them into unread messages, spam, etc.

Change Notifications

And since notification sounds can be a nightmare, especially when the same sound is played for all messages, how about adding a class? For example, you can choose one sound for your personal contacts, a different sound for your colleagues and managers, and a different sound for all other messages. You can, of course, always turn off notifications completely if you can’t stand them either.

According to the Wall Street Journal.