My girlfriend texts me all the time. Like, All The Time. Nice, but the constant interruptions make it hard to concentrate. Is there a way to mute her so the notifications don’t keep popping up on my Mac system?
Awww, it’s nice that your girlfriend is so into you that she texts you all the time! Well, then again sounds like maybe that’s a mixed blessing and if she has lots of spare time and you’re busy trying to work, I can completely understand your dilemma. One trick I like is to actually have all my notifications only show up on my phone so that I can flip it face down when I need to concentrate and have it face up when I’m fine with the interrupts.
But Messages [aka iMessage] on a MacOS X system has tricks of its own that can help you, settings you can change that let you get notifications on your Mac screen if other people text you – like your Mom or stockbroker – but mute your girlfriend. It’s called “do not disturb” and while it sounds like something that would be an all-or-nothing setting, can actually be assigned to specific people or accounts.
Let’s have a look!
First off, I’ll use my friend Steve as a guinea pig. Here he is in Messages, along with a few other friends:
Because I have the cursor over his entry, the background’s blue. Useful, particularly if I Control-click on his name. This brings up the Messages context menu and it’s full of goodness and useful features:
You can jump to the chase directly by choosing “Do Not Disturb” here, but let’s instead choose “Details…” and see what that reveals…
You can see that, again, there’s the “Do Not Disturb” option here in Messages, but the more interesting setting is “Send Read Receipts”. Some people like to know when their text messages are read and if your girlfriend is sufficiently savvy, she could ostensibly get upset if you read a text and take an hour or two to respond. Sidestep that by making sure you have disabled Send Read Receipts. 🙂
Choose Do Not Disturb and you won’t get notifications when they send new text messages to you via Messages. You’ll get a subtle reminder icon:
See it? The tiny moon icon to the left of his face.
Back to the Details window, however, did you notice the icons along the top? They make it easy to share screens, start a video chat (via FaceTime) and actually call them on the phone if you have their number on file:
You can also get to all these functions from the main context menu, which is nice. Whatever works for you, Apple has you covered!
One more thing; you can also pull someone’s interchange into its own window too, by choosing “Open Conversation in Separate Window” from the main context menu. You end up with something streamlined like this:
A nice way to organize things. Now, back to work with you and good luck with your chatty friend!