I’m Not Driving

I love my iPhone’s Do Not Disturb feature which mutes the parade of bells and vibrations that come from it. I use it at night so I’m not woken up to the ding of some robot account which liked one of my Instagram photos from four years ago.

I’ve always wanted to use it for temporary moments throughout my day when I don’t want to be disturbed, but after forgetting to turn it off and missing important messages on several occasions, I stopped trusting it for this purpose. It’s just too easy to miss the little moon icon up there reminding me.

But with iOS 11, Apple introduced a related feature: Do Not Disturb While Driving. It holds back on notifications like its older cousin of a feature, but it also won’t let you interact with the phone while it’s on. You have to press an additional button asserting “I’m Not Driving.” My phone automatically turns this on when I’m in the car, which is annoying in the short term, but better for me overall.

But I’ve actually started to manually turn on the feature – you can put it in Control Center – for those temporary moments of peace. And because of the way the feature is designed, it won’t let me use my phone until I turn it off. This way I can’t forget it’s on so long as I try to use my phone.

Which is too often.