There are some things your phone can tell you that are urgent, like someone changing plans at the last minute. But that is not so urgent that you couldn’t wait to pull over.
I think I experience quite a lot of things that are very time-sensitive (though they’re rarely important), more time-sensitive than you indicated. E.g. my friend is at the grocery store buying some items for a dinner party we’re throwing together. They ask, “Do you have flour or should I buy some? I’m on the checkout line.” Or my partner is about to leave the house and asks which bottle of wine to bring as a gift to the party we’re going to, and if he waits another few min, he will miss the upcoming train and be late. These things are often urgent on the scale of 1-7 min.
Personally? In various complicated ways. I wasn’t advocating for always attending to such things, just disputing that highly time-sensitive messages rarely come about at all.
With all of these anecdotes, you should ask yourself, what did people do before they had cell phones? Cell phones aren’t that old! It’s not like the 1990s and early 2000s were some pre-civilizational state where people just couldn’t coordinate or make decisions for lack of instant communication across vast distances.
I agree with and really like most of this post.
I think I experience quite a lot of things that are very time-sensitive (though they’re rarely important), more time-sensitive than you indicated. E.g. my friend is at the grocery store buying some items for a dinner party we’re throwing together. They ask, “Do you have flour or should I buy some? I’m on the checkout line.” Or my partner is about to leave the house and asks which bottle of wine to bring as a gift to the party we’re going to, and if he waits another few min, he will miss the upcoming train and be late. These things are often urgent on the scale of 1-7 min.
How do you evaluate the cost/benefit of buying more flour than necessary and bringing the wrong wine versus being a slave to your phone at all times?
Personally? In various complicated ways. I wasn’t advocating for always attending to such things, just disputing that highly time-sensitive messages rarely come about at all.
With all of these anecdotes, you should ask yourself, what did people do before they had cell phones? Cell phones aren’t that old! It’s not like the 1990s and early 2000s were some pre-civilizational state where people just couldn’t coordinate or make decisions for lack of instant communication across vast distances.
I think a bunch of these kinds of things are plots for Seinfeld episodes.