For a long time I expected that when I sent someone a message, I was owed a response almost immediately. This caused problems with friends, fights with my partner and frustration with business partners because they were, in my mind, all ignoring me.

Here’s how it went down in my mind: What absolute bullshit! How can it take anyone two hours to reply to a message from ME!? Surely they know I have things to do and their reply is imperative to the continuation of my day. Without this immediate response my day is ruined, don’t they know!? I just spoke to them like ten minutes ago, did they throw their phone over the wall and jump off a cliff? COME ON!

That is how my mind understood communication; I sent you a message, aren’t you lucky, you must respond immediately.

Earlier this year I was working in a high-pressure startup that required a lot of care and attention. The founding team - of which I was a part - was in close communication almost every hour on the hour throughout much of the day and a chunk of the evening. We operated in multiple timezones and even when we were altogether everything was urgent and it was understood that responses were immediate for any and all communication.

Then I left the company.

When my time at the company was over I decided to rethink how I use the communication tools at my disposal. I took a very detailed look at my anxiety levels, stress levels and my expectations of the people around me. I realised that real-time communication was destroying me, my relationships and my ability to do the work that I was most interested in.

Everything is real-time in 2020. News, communication, trauma, success, happiness, sadness, it’s all in real-time and streamed all over the world. You want to watch something else? Cool, pick from Hulu, Netflix, HBO, Amazon Prime, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, etc etc. You don’t like what you’re reading? Cool, change it up and read something new on your kindle, phone, iPad, laptop. You want to see your friend a million miles away? No problem, Whatsapp video call, Zoom, Hangouts, Skype, Teams, check their Instagram story, Facebook story, TikTok uploads or anything else. You want it. You got it. No questions asked.

Even email is not perceived as asynchronous any longer. People expect you to receive, read and reply within minutes and if you don’t reply they send you a Whatsapp message and if you don’t reply to that they straight up, old school dial your number and phone you to tell you about the Whatsapp message they sent you about the email they sent you.

There is no escaping it, people expect you to reply to everything immediately.

But before I go on, let’s try to understand what happens to your brain when you receive an email or message.

“I feel tremendous guilt,” admitted Chamath Palihapitiya, former Vice President of User Growth at Facebook, to an audience of Stanford students. He was responding to a question about his involvement in exploiting consumer behavior. “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works,” he explained. 

The above quote is pulled from a Harvard article titled Dopamine, Smartphones & You: A battle for your time.

The article goes on to explain how dopamine engages with our social interactions and causes us to crave “successful” social interactions.

Dopamine is a chemical produced by our brains that plays a starring role in motivating behavior. It gets released when we take a bite of delicious food, when we have sex, after we exercise, and, importantly, when we have successful social interactions. In an evolutionary context, it rewards us for beneficial behaviors and motivates us to repeat them.

We are being “rewarded” for what the world is telling us are beneficial behaviours. Every time you get a “ping” a “ding” a “buzz” or a flash of light about a new message or email you are being rewarded with a dopamine hit that reconfirms you are doing well socially. Social networks and social proof have led us to believe that posting, reading, messaging and engaging on social networks is a “beneficial behaviour”. Work environments have conditioned us to believe that doing email is a core function of our job and work. It’s often how we’re measured subconsciously by our peers and colleagues.

We’ve been tricked by Facebook (which owns Whatsapp and Instagram), LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapchat and all the others. Even the person who designed the exploitation at Facebook admits that we’ve been tricked. You now even get a little red mark on you browser tab that tries to pull you back into these services if there’s an unread notification. It’s brutal.

So I leave the high-intensity of a startup and decide to try and get to grips with my anxiety and stress caused by communication.

The first thing I did was turn off the blue-tick-read-receipt insanity of Whatsapp. Now I can’t see if people have read my messages and they can’t see if I’ve read theirs.

The second thing I did was activate a permanent out of office response telling people that I don’t do email as my work so they shouldn’t expect immediate replies from me.

The final thing that I did was refocus my work away from communication and towards my actual work.

Initially, I was fidgety and irate, constantly in anticipation of someone reading my message and responding. But then the craziest thing happened after a couple of weeks… I stopped caring about return communication. I stopped expecting people to message me back immediately and that meant I was never disappointed when they took two days to reply.

This is a key revelation. With blue-ticks on, I was constantly disappointed by people who did not reply to me as quickly as I reply to them. That rage and disappointment completely disappeared when I realised that they probably also have a job, emails, work to do, meetings, kids, husbands, wives, parents, stress, anxiety and that I was, SHOCKINGLY, not at the top of their priority list.

Expectation is the thief of patience.

I expect you to reply immediately so I have no patience relating to your day, your life and no respect for your time.

Recently I was contacted on Facebook by someone I used to know and last saw about 20 years ago. He was a kid (11 or 12) when I knew his brother and he had just seen me on a TV interview. He expected a reply and when he didn’t get one he lashed out at me and got very angry. He even sent me the “contact information” of very famous people that he allegedly knew to show me how important he is. Can you imagine being so demanding of someone else’s time that you become aggressive, name call and insult someone over chat when they don’t reply?

I blocked him and moved on with my day but the interaction really shocked me.

Have we become so desperate for social proof from others that if they are busy or just don’t want to talk to you we lash out? I think we have and I don’t like being desperate.

The incredible outcome of turning off read receipts and notifications for all communication is that I do not check my phone obsessively in case someone has messaged me.

My self worth is not directly tied to other people engaging with me in real-time. I have more time to focus on my work and my time is more focused because I’m not constantly distracted.

If you feel frazzled, harassed and are tired of people disappointing you because they dared to respond to you a few hours or a few days later than you expected, perhaps it’s time for you to reassess your self worth and the work you do.

Email is not your job. Email was never your job. Messaging is not a right, it’s a privilege.

You do not own other people’s time or their list of priorities. You have a gift called communication, use it to empower your day not destroy it. Take back control by not replying to every message and email as if it’s all urgent. It’s not.