More Texts, More Tofu

In the last year, I’ve fallen into an odd habit. It’s not bad, per se, it’s just…odd.

I almost entirely stopped texting. 

I mean, I’ve still been communicating. I spend way too much time emailing - work, friends, the occasional email to the dentist about why I’m postponing my cleaning again. I probably do more phone calls than your average millennial, with one weekly pre-scheduled marathon with my bestie and shorter calls with family every day. I also sprinkle in post-kids-bedtime Zoom chats a few nights a month, because I’m living in 2020 forever.

So I don’t feel out of the loop. I just feel…textually overwhelmed. And by texting, I mean WhatsApp, too. (I feel like they are the same. Honestly so is Slack in my mind, too, although I am on top of my Slack much more than my texts).

I just felt like texting was one more thing and I was slowly losing my mind trying to keep up, and so I just...stopped. I am a horrible moderator and would rather quit something entirely than try to moderate it (which is why I don’t drink any alcohol or soda). But as I write this, I have 327 unread text messages and 104 unread WhatsApp messages, which does seem…hmmm… a tad much.

I’ve been mitigating my no texting stance by doing an occasional triage, where I scroll through the wreckage of my text inbox (my tinbox?) to make sure I didn’t miss anything critical….and I will occasionally shoot a text off if it’s someone’s birthday or I see a text that from the kids’ school, but my mountain of unread texts just stays so high and it stresses me out.

So:

I’m going to get back into the rhythm of just doing a quick text check in more often. The 2025 goal is being under 100 unread texts and under 50 WhatsApp messages at any given time. That seems manageable.

I’ll update you how it goes…

PS. My other resolutions this year is to eat more protein and work on this newsletter. 2025 motto: More Texts, More Tofu, More (Beck on) Tech.