I think this is a cool hack. And I frequently use delayed messages on Google Messages to obscure my late working hours and refrain from disturbing people with a 3AM notification.<p>But I've thought about this a bit recently, and I don't think I should have to worry about bothering someone at 3 AM. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect other people to have do not disturb on / notifications off whenever they don't want to be disturbed.<p>And one cautionary tale about scheduling messages (email in particular): I once encountered a problem at 3AM and scheduled an 8AM text to tell someone about it, but they woke up at 6AM and immediately fixed it and were confused why I still had the problem two hours later (when my message arrived).
Another common feature of a default app that Apple lacks is having multiple timers on the iPhone clock app. Most often used by my partner when cooking and there are a couple things going that need different times. This is a feature in my Pixel and I just can't understand what reason there is to not include it.<p>That said though, this is a fantastic work around, I love seeing clever uses of tools to make them do things their creators (probably) didn't necessarily intend.
> so I had come to depend on it in my daily workflow. It’s especially useful in situations where I have a work-related thought at 3AM and don’t want to risk waking up and annoying my co-workers.<p>At first glance this seems like a perfect match for e-mail instead of iMessage or SMS.<p>From least to most urgent:
Postcard
E-Mail
Slack
iMessage
SMS
Call
> It’s especially useful in situations where I have a work-related thought at 3AM and don’t want to risk waking up and annoying my co-workers.<p>Just send an email?<p>If it doesn’t require an immediate response, use email.<p>Also if it’s iPhone to iPhone you likely won’t interrupt the other user since they would/should have night mode on anyway.
Adding a new calendar for this seems odd. You can skip that step and load your messages from the Notes app, or use something like Data Jar [0] to store your messages in the desired structure, alongside the phone number and date/time you expect them to go out on (assuming you have set multiple automations throughout the day that would check if a message needs to be sent out that hour).<p>Admittedly this is still a bit hacky, but good to see that it's possible.<p>[0]: <a href="https://datajar.app/" rel="nofollow">https://datajar.app/</a>
I feel like this is trying to dodge IM and email noise fatigue and having that bleed into texts. I'm nocturnal when I have the choice so I understand, but would definitely mute a coworker if they regularly texted me on a schedule for when I wake up.
For what it's worth, our "Groups" app (which has been downloaded by 10 million people in 95+ countries) has offered this kind of feature for years. It lets you set reminders to send mass messages to people. It also does things like list contacts by the time you met them, so if you went to a party last night or a week ago, you can see who you have to follow up with.<p>We meant to turn it into a full-fledged ORM, but we got busy with the Qbix Platform. Anyway, if you want to give it a try, go here: <a href="https://qbix.com/GROUPS" rel="nofollow">https://qbix.com/GROUPS</a>
There’s an automation that’s triggered when you receive an email. Coupled with Mail’s “Send later” feature in iOS 16 and some parsing, you can send messages at any time you want.
When shortcuts were first released I immediately tried to implement delayed messaging too. In the end I wasn’t able to get it working and gave up. Great job finding this workaround!
This is a really fun feature.
I used this to make automatic birthday messages based on the birthday’s calendar.<p>Since the contacts app syncs with the birthday calendar, it’s easy enough to map names to phone numbers.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gXL1S4MnyE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gXL1S4MnyE</a>
I usually send sms from the Unix shell so a delayed message takes the form of:<p><pre><code> sleep 7200 ; sms …
</code></pre>
(Where ‘sms’ is a shell script that hits the twilio api with curl)<p>If I drop my phone in the river I can still send sms from my own phone number.<p>Not “blue” bubble though…
I find as I get older, I want to simplify. I know setting this up would be easy but it’s just one more thing to mess with that isn’t tackling a fundamental issue. The fundamental issue here is why you want to send delayed messages not how.
forget work, This would be useful for texting someone you’re interested in that would be wary of someone that text at an odd hour or “too soon”, just send the thing you are thinking of at the time but set a delay!
very useful, thanks for sharing!<p>I ended up configuring the shortcut to use the location field rather than title field. So at least my calendar won't look odd.<p>Still works as expected. I wasn't entirely sure how to format the text field so it would pick up the phone numbers (in case of group messages). So I just went with my gut and used a space separator for each distinct number and typed the fully qualified number (ie, +1YYYXXXZZZZ)
You can make a new shortcut that is triggered by a specific hour. Not sure why this post says it can’t be done.<p>I used it last month to wish someone happy birthday.