Me: “Oh, I need to respond to that later.”

Text Message: cries softly as it floats into the void, never to be seen again

Text Message Chaos and Overwhelm

Until recently, I’ve managed my text messages differently from email or work-related instant messaging.

I never did anything with text messages other than collect hundreds upon hundreds of conversations that sat in a chronological heap waiting to welcome me each time I opened my messaging app. Conversations that needed a response would get intermixed with ones that did not need a response and would get buried as more messages were received in yet other conversations. I don’t receive a ton of text messages, but with no system at all to handle them, I felt overwhelmed when opening my messaging app and was ghosting a lot of people as a result.

This led to some cognitive dissonance where I felt like a wizard in the world of email, but I felt like a Neanderthal when it came to responding to friends and family over text.

My Text Message Triage System

Now my process for handling texts is similar to my process for emails. Conceptually, I think of my messaging app like my email inbox, with each conversation being like an extremely long-running email thread.

For each message I receive, I work through the following questions:

1. Can This Conversation Be Deleted?

Bye-bye spam. I don’t delete many conversations because they don’t take up much storage anyway, but if it’s something I know I will never revisit then I burn it with fire and move on with my day.

2. Is This Message Just for Reference?

Archive it! If I don’t need to respond, then conversations go straight to my archive where they can still be searched and retrieved.

3. Can I Respond In 2 Minutes?

Just do it! Future-me has better things to do and doesn’t need the cognitive overhead of thinking about needing to respond. Knock this out now.

After I’ve responded, I archive the conversation to get it out of my inbox. The only exception is if I am awaiting a quick response and I will want to follow up if I don’t receive one. Then it stays in the inbox.

4. Do I Need to Respond, But Can’t Right Now?

This one is a more context dependent.

If I can’t respond because I just don’t have time, then the message stays in the inbox. Unread or read, doesn’t matter. If it’s in the inbox, I need to get to it.

If I need to do something before I can respond, then that gets transferred to my to-do list, and I leave the message in the inbox.

Other Notes on My System

Some Group Chats Stay in The Inbox

I would love to get to complete inbox-zero and archive EVERYTHING, but with Google Messages if I archive a group chat, it is clunky to start a new message to the chat. So, I leave three of my high-volume group chats in my inbox at all times.

Use Swipe Actions

Swipe right to delete a conversation, swipe left to archive it. This helps me move through messages quickly.