This article may sound like a rant, but I assure you it is not. I have been guilty of this behavior myself.
Have you ever sent a text to a friend or family member and never received a response for a month? Maybe you never got a response back. Maybe there was one response, but no more to follow-up questions from you about meeting up.
As I said, I have not responded texts before from friends and family for a long time. I look at a text and forget about it. I have also delayed my response because I overthink it. I get afraid that I may say something wrong or make the wrong choice. I talked to my dad about this and he said he also delays in getting back to people. I am not talking about where you really don't know how to answer because you lack details on your schedule or you have had issues with this person in the past. I am not talking about when you are extremely busy with school or work that you don't have time to respond. I am talking about when you step back and realize there is no good reason to take a long time in responding.
A part of this is due to the problem of not wanting to commit. Instead of answering a friend's question with a yes or no, we hesitate to even give an answer because we are afraid of missing a better opportunity. Another reason is that texting is a mild form of communication; one does not feel an urgency to answer a text compared to someone asking them face to face. It could even be because you are like me where you overthink responses and are afraid of getting someone upset.
How many of your peers have said to you "I need to respond to texts better?" Many of mine have. It shows that I am not the only one who has struggled with this. Furthermore, this is something they have repeated to me over the last few years.
So what do we do? First, we need to retrain our perception of texting. Texting is not the best form of communication and it should not be used for personal conversations. However, we need to keep in mind that there is another human being who sent that text to us. I am not being overly philosophical here, it is just a good way of looking at it because you will see responding to a text as important. And it is your friend, you should care about them asking to hang out. It doesn't mean you have to say yes; taking the time to tell them "no" shows you care more compared to never responding.
Set a goal for yourself. Decide that you will keep an average response time to texts from your friends and family. Maybe set it for two days at the most. If you are really ambitious, try 24 hours. I like to keep mine within 24 hours, if possible. Texts don't need to be long messages and it only takes a minute to give a quick response.
If you are an extremely busy person and forget to respond frequently, tell friends that so they understand the long response time. But I will say this, you need to actually be busy. Working 8 hours a day, five days a week is a lot of work, but you have a minute during a break, in the morning (depending on when you get up), and in the evening during dinner time. If you are working two jobs just to make enough money, different story. Call me harsh or extreme, but it is possible to respond in a timely manner to texts.
I am still not perfect at responding to texts, but I am doing a thousand times better than I used to. I am not angry at people who don't respond to texts because I know that 95% of the time is due to forgetting to respond. Keep in mind that I am not encouraging people to text more. Conversations through texting should be short and simple, not in-depth conversations that should be done in person. Instead, I am encouraging people to respond to text messages better. It only takes a minute to respond with a yes or no. Heck, it would not take long to explain that you are usually too busy to hang out.
This is not about having to hang out with a friend or family member more, it is about better communication. It is not the end of the world when you don't respond to a text, but I believe it is a courtesy when one responds in a timely manner.
