Microprocessing
Now Is the Time to Bring Back Away Messages
Life is totally online — we need ways to politely disconnect
I spend most Thursdays heads down writing. The task is one that, at least for me, requires absolute focus, a quality that I have to essentially beg some corner of my brain to extend to me for a few hours. This usually fails, making the draft take twice as long as it has to. Even now, my phone is lighting up with a text; several Twitter direct messages are awaiting my response; I have an email open in another tab that I actually want to answer.
There are a number of things I could do, some of which I’ve suggested in other columns, like turning off notifications (off for everything but texts, at the moment) and setting an alarm that dictates when I can look at any social media (I usually do this by the hour). Both methods help, but there’s a tool that, if more readily available and widely used, would make perhaps the biggest difference of all: away messages.
In the glory days of online communication (2002 to 2009, in my rough, highly personal estimation), away messages were popular on AOL’s instant messaging service and acted a bit like digital Post-it notes stuck to a door: messages that would pop up next to a user’s handle indicating that a person was unavailable to…
