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Have you ever rolled over to the sound of what should indicate a good morning text and realized, “I don’t have a man”? And yet your phone is going off at an ungodly hour in which only someone who is your man or in a dire state of emergency should be contacting you. Lately, this has happened to me more often than not and I’ve come to the conclusion that what I thought were understood hours of acceptable texting are not so understood.
Earlier this week I received a text at 11:49 pm from a college associate/professional friend asking for my email address to send along information on an event happening a couple of days later. As someone who appreciates rapid responses to my texts and emails, I thought about sending the requested information, but then I thought more about the fact that I was nestled snug in my bed like a kid on Christmas Eve and said to myself, Why is he texting me at this hour?
That slight perturbation was magnified exponentially when eight hours later two other associates had texted me at 8:03 am and 8:30 am, respectively, with questions and well wishes that honestly I couldn’t receive, nor respond to at that hour. Perhaps it’s the fact that I’m on this two-a-day workout kick and every hour of sleep, work, and physical activity is more precious to me than ever, but I found myself extremely irritated by these text distractions at an hour when mostly everyone with a traditional work schedule is either attempting to get crust out of their eye or cut the crust off the sandwiches they’re packing for their kids’ lunches. The morning rush is a time when people are trying to peacefully begin their day before they step into the real world and someone ruins it or push through the chaos to at least get to work on time — it’s not a time for nonessential communication in the form of a text.
To make sure I wasn’t just in one of my moods, which is always a safe assumption when it comes to me, I asked a couple of friends how they felt about people texting them late at night or too early in the morning and we were on the same page. Like the hours of 9-5 are assumed to be for work, one friend said people should only text you between 9-10. I agreed, though I wouldn’t mind pushing that 9 am time back to 10 am.
And while you’re probably thinking, “Why don’t you just tell these people not to text you at these times?” I struggle with figuring out how to do that. On one hand, some of these situations are isolated incidents, magnified by the fact that multiple people are violating at the same time and so I quickly find myself enraged. If you happen to text me super early one day, thinking nothing of it, I don’t want to blow the situation out of proportion. Though I have dropped several cues with people saying, “Hey I didn’t want to text you too early, etc. etc.,” in hopes they’ll return the courtesy when they see I wait until late morning to reach out to them. They don’t.
I’ve also found myself in this predicament professionally quite often. On a recent business trip, a colleague texted me around 11 pm asking me to come to a club. Given the nature of the request and the fact that I didn’t have their number saved, I assumed it was some man I’d scrubbed from my life and my phone on a booty call mission; hence the “Who is this?” response. It turned out to be a high level exec in my company who wanted to introduce me to some clients. Nevertheless, the way my head was wrapped and my makeup was removed I couldn’t go. And while I joked with her about texting me at that time the next day, it was just one more infraction on my growing lists of incidents making me question, why do people think they have access to me at all times of the day — and night?
Realizing my culpability in this, I have made it a point not to respond to people at these hours. Even though that would be the simple thing to do — and what comes most natural to me — I’m attempting to set a precedent that says “If this is an emergency, please pick up the phone and call your mama; otherwise, if this is not an attempted booty call, please text me between the hours of 10 am and 10 pm.” But I also want people to stop skipping past email and going straight for texts and Instagram DMs when it comes to professional inquiries. Because so many of our personal and professional lives are intertwined these days, people seem to forget modes of communication shouldn’t be. Everyone wants to have some time when they don’t have to do work or think about it. I also want some time when I don’t want to be texted or notified of one, and those are between the hours of 10 am and 10 pm — give or take.
