~by Haley Lynn Gray~
The sheer number of text messages we get in a single day can be mind-boggling. Back and forth — Do this! Hey, did you remember that? What’s for dinner? Who’s going to pick up the kids. Beep. Beep. Another text, and another. They keep adding up. You can’t control how many texts you receive, but you can control how you decide to deal with them.
7 tips for managing text messages
- Texts are not synchronous. Nothing about the format requires that a message be read the moment it arrives, however much the buzz suggests otherwise.
- They don’t require an instant response. When you are otherwise occupied, don’t answer them.
- Turn off audible notifications for all but the most important people. Your spouse, perhaps your children. If your job genuinely depends on it, that can stay on the list too — but be honest about whether it does.
- Schedule time to go through them and reply, much as you should be doing with email.
- Set a sleep time on your phone, so unless something is genuinely urgent you aren’t woken by a buzz at 2am.
- Use talk-to-text so you aren’t typing out all the small stuff.
- Use the auto-read function so that if you must receive messages while driving, you aren’t looking at your phone.
Why this is harder than it sounds
Every tip above is easy to agree with and hard to do, and the reason isn’t discipline. It’s that a text message carries an implied claim about urgency that almost none of them deserve.
Someone typing “quick question” has made a decision about your time without asking you. The buzz arrives with that decision already embedded in it. Which is why turning off notifications feels faintly rude — you are refusing a claim that was never yours to accept in the first place.
Worth noticing what you are actually protecting. It is not your calendar; texts take seconds. It is your attention, which recovers far more slowly than the interruption itself took. A two-second message can cost ten minutes of getting back to where you were.
What changes when you run the business
All of this gets sharper when you own the place, because two things are true at once that aren’t true for an employee.
You genuinely are the escalation point. Some of those messages really are urgent, and there is nobody else they could reasonably go to. That’s real, and advice that ignores it is useless.
And your availability sets the standard. If you answer at 11pm, you have taught your team that 11pm is a reasonable time to ask. If you reply within thirty seconds during a client meeting, you have taught them that interrupting you carries no cost. Nobody will ever say this out loud. They will simply calibrate to what you do.
That makes response time a policy decision rather than a personal preference — and like most policy in a small business, it gets set by accident unless someone sets it deliberately.
The practical version: decide what actually constitutes urgent, tell people what it is, and give them a route for it. What doesn’t work is hoping people will guess.
What I actually tell my team
I have landed somewhere slightly different from “only text me if X”, and it took a few expensive lessons to get there.
The rule I use now is: tell me if you have a problem. Not because I want to approve everything — the opposite. It’s because too many times people made a decision on their own, went off into left field, and got something sort-of done in a way that cost an enormous amount of money and time and made no sense at all.
That’s the failure mode nobody warns you about when you start delegating. You brace for people who won’t decide anything. What actually happens is that someone decides confidently, in a direction you’d never have gone, and you find out weeks later when the invoice arrives.
So the framing I use is: I give you permission to make decisions, and those decisions need to make sense — for you, for me, and for the business.
All three parts matter. For you, because a decision that makes your job impossible isn’t a good one. For me, because I’m the one who answers for it. And for the business, because plenty of choices are comfortable for the person making them and quietly terrible for the company.
That does two things at once. It stops the flood of permission-seeking texts, because people know they’re allowed to act. And it stops the left-field decisions, because “does this make sense for the business” is a question most people can answer honestly if you actually ask them to.
It also means the messages that do reach me are worth reading, which is the whole point.
The interruption that taught me the most
Not every message that feels urgent to the sender is urgent.
Last year I was in the car on the way to Atlanta for major surgery. A client — who had known for weeks that this was happening, and exactly when — chose that window to create a crisis. They had got into an argument with their spouse about who was paying, told my team they wouldn’t pay, and simultaneously expected us to keep providing services for weeks and complete an elaborate offboarding process immediately.
While I was en route to hospital.
What strikes me about it now isn’t the rudeness. It’s that at no point did it appear to register that I was about to have surgery, wouldn’t be working for a while, and that my team was entirely capable of handling it. The urgency was real to them. It had nothing to do with whether anything actually needed to happen that afternoon.
They were fired.
The useful lesson wasn’t about boundaries in the abstract. It was that some people will treat your availability as unlimited until you demonstrate otherwise, and no notification setting solves that. That’s a client selection problem, not a phone problem.
What sacred time actually looks like
I do set a sleep time and a wake time. I also block time to eat, time to work out, and time with my husband.
Those blocks are not suggestions. They’re on the calendar, and they are sacred in a way most people reserve for client meetings. If you looked at my calendar you would see lunch and dinner blocked, a strict bedtime, and separate time set aside for admin.
That level of structure sounds rigid written down. In practice it’s the opposite — it’s what makes the rest of it possible, because the things that matter have already been claimed before anyone else gets to ask for the time.
The honest footnote: I’m writing this at 8:44pm on a Saturday, because this particular thing entertains me. The blocks aren’t a monastic rule. They’re a default that holds unless I actively choose otherwise, which is very different from having no default at all and letting whoever texts last decide what your evening is for.
The test worth running
For one week, note every message that interrupted something and ask afterwards whether it needed to.
Most owners find the same thing: a small number of people account for most of the interruptions, and a large share of those messages were requests for information that exists somewhere else. That’s not a phone problem. It’s a sign that the answer isn’t written down anywhere, so the fastest route to it is you.
Text messages are here to stay, and for some people they are the main form of communication. Learning to manage the beeps and buzzes is key to staying sane. But if the volume is genuinely overwhelming, the fix usually isn’t a better notification setting. It’s changing what people have to come to you for.
About the author
Haley Lynn Gray is the founder of Leadership Girl, of In2itive Biz Solutions, and of the Women’s Entrepreneur Network — a community of more than 77,000 women in business.
She writes here about what happens when running a business starts demanding that you lead one. More about Haley →
