Buzz
Fun fact: you don’t need to be driving to use your smartphone’s Do Not Disturb While Driving mode. Activate it anytime you need a break from your device, and personalize the automatic reply to let others know why you're unavailable and when you'll get back to them.
Consider it an out-of-office reply, but for your phone.
Behavioral design expert Nir Eyal shares this technique in his latest book Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. He recommends this customized message:
Hello! This is an automated message to let you know that I’m currently in a distraction-free zone. I won’t see your message right away, but I’ll respond to you shortly.
(I’m not receiving notifications. If this is urgent, reply with “urgent” to send a notification with your original message.)
If you're using an iPhone, there are still ways for people to contact you in an emergency—they can reply with “urgent” as mentioned earlier or call you twice consecutively.
I’ve been searching for a solution like this because my current method of staying “indistractable” while working involves keeping my phone on silent and face-down—but then I worry I might miss an urgent call from my parents, who live nearby.
I could set my phone to Do Not Disturb full time, allowing me to receive calls from family if they call twice in a row, but I really like the idea of customizing my message for different situations. (“I’m at work,” “I’m on vacation,” “I’m having a phone-free day,” etc.) I grew up with the AIM away message, so I’m already thinking of how I could make this fun.
It’s similar to setting up one of those, what did they used to be called?—answering machines. A polite way to inform people that you’re unavailable at the moment, but you’ll get back to them later.
If you’d like to know how to activate and customize the DND While Driving auto-response on your phone, we’ve got a detailed guide for you:
And yes, I’m adding “set up a personalized DND While Driving message” to my to-do list for the afternoon.
What about you?
