Notifications

Your Phone After the Last Showing

A Late Film, a Work Question and a Friend at the Bar

Some apps can let the people writing in them know that a message will wait.1 This is one of those nights, in Ravi’s local cinema.

  • Slack can pause its notifications for a chosen time. Other people then see a snooze icon next to the name, and someone sending a direct message can still notify about something urgent once a day.1
  • Instagram’s Sleep mode pauses its notifications for the hours chosen. People who message you get an auto-reply explaining that you won’t be notified, and your activity status changes to “In sleep mode.”2
Ravi in a long coat and beanie in a dim cinema lobby, looking at his phone, its light on his face

Ravi walks out of the last showing

The slow-burn thriller lets out after midnight. Ravi turned on Do Not Disturb before the trailers, and the phone has been silent since. In the lobby he opens Slack. A coworker wrote at ten past ten asking for a file, then again at eleven: is he around? All evening, his name looked to her the way it does at noon.

Ravi walking through a night car park, reading his phone, with parked cars and a streetlight behind him

Ravi reads his messages walking to the car

On the walk through the car park he opens Instagram. A friend sent a photo from a bar at half past ten, then three more messages: is he still coming, is he all right, fine, never mind. Ravi reads them under a streetlight, an hour and a half late.

Ravi sitting in the driver’s seat of a car at night, rubbing his eyes, a phone lit up in the glove box

Ravi sits in the car before driving home

In the car he answers his coworker in Slack first: sorry, he was at a film, and the file is in the shared folder. Then he puts the phone in the glove box, rubs his eyes and waits a minute before he starts the engine.

By half past midnight

Ravi had taken Do Not Disturb for all the quiet a phone could keep. He had no idea Slack and Instagram could each go quiet in a way the people writing to him would see, Slack’s from his profile picture and Instagram’s under Time management.

True to you

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TrueTo goes into each app and changes the setting the way you would. Every one of them is reversible, one at a time.

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Ravi walks out of the last showing

If Ravi had used TrueTo, it would have gone into Slack and Instagram and turned on Pause notifications in Slack and Sleep mode in Instagram for him.

Ravi reads his messages walking to the car

With Sleep mode on in Instagram, her first message would have brought back an auto-reply saying he would not be notified, and his status would have read “In sleep mode.”

Ravi sits in the car before driving home

With Pause notifications on in Slack, his coworker would have seen a snooze icon next to his name, and each change would have been his to undo in the morning, in its own app.

Pause notifications

In Slack, from his profile picture, Ravi can turn on Pause notifications himself and choose how long.1 In Instagram, under Settings and activity and then Time management, he can turn on Sleep mode and set its hours.3

Sources

  1. Slack, “Pause your Slack notifications,” Slack Help Center, read October 12, 2026.
  2. Instagram, “Turn sleep mode on or off on Instagram,” Instagram Help Center, read October 12, 2026.
  3. Meta, “Instagram Quiet Mode: A New Way to Manage Your Time and Focus,” Meta Newsroom, January 19, 2023.