As a clinical counselor, I have to reduce as many distractions as possible when I meet with my clients. My first month on the job, my phone was on vibrate sitting on my computer table and started vibrating due to a text message. My need for professionalism kicked in hard, I apologized profusely to the client, and put my phone on silent.
Months later, an accidental alarm was on my phone for something completely different that went off. In between sessions, I found Do Not Disturb and for the past six years have left my phone on this mode. Of course, if there is an emergency, my wife can contact support staff to get me, but I have yet to need that.
The limitation of simply leaving Do Not Disturb on is that I don’t get notified via vibration or noise when I’m in the car and my wife wants me to get milk or go pick up my son from soccer. I did some research and found out that you can actually add rules to your Android’s Do Not Disturb setting, which has been a game-changer.
If you want to know all the ins and outs of this, you can visit Google’s FAQ page, but I’ll share what options you might want to consider. Here’s what you can do for your own dynamic do not disturb:
- Create a rule that can repeat on certain days at certain times. Pastors, go ahead and set this for when you will be preaching. Congregation members, probably should do the same for when you go to church. This makes your phone go to silent mode every Sunday at the preselected time.
- Associate your Do Not Disturb with calendar events. When an event comes up, an office meeting or prayer meeting with elders, you don’t even have to check your phone, it’s already set. The limitations are that you do have to use Google calendars and make sure you set up the calendar event correctly.
- You can also individually customize your Do Not Disturb notifications and alarms if you want to get granular. Want your spouse’s phone calls to come in when you are at a Bible study, but nothing else? Done.
I certainly wouldn’t want to hurt Apple users’ feelings, mostly because they leave comments whining how they have it too, so you can look at their FAQ list here. As is normal with features, Android’s is more versitile if you need to get into the weeds of it, but Apple’s feature would suffice for my own needs.
How are you using dynamic do not disturb? If not, how are you going to use it? Share your ideas in the comments below.
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