See also: Non-correspondence texting

I hit a milestone today. For the first time since I got a phone, I had replied to all of my outstanding texts.¹ (It lasted two minutes).

As many of my friends will tell you, this is quite the feat for me. I'm not a good texter. I take forever to respond, or don't respond at all. But I'm getting better, and the tips I've listed here have helped me, particularly for long-term conversations. I hope they help you too.

What is correspondence texting?

If I was living thirty years ago, I wouldn't keep up with most of my friends over text, mostly because texting had barely been invented.² Instead, I'd probably be using some combination of handwritten letters, faxed letters, email, computer instant messages, and phone calls.

I am at risk of romanticizing the past, but I think texting has disadvantages over these media for long-term communication.³ While texting is excellent for quick timescales, it has several disadvantages for maintaining friendships over time.

• Texting pressures you to respond shortly and quickly, rather than infrequently at length.
• Texting conversations often die, especially if replies are infrequent.
• It's hard to look back over old conversations.

If I had the choice, I'd prefer to keep up with friends over email/phone, but texting's ease has made it the default choice. I've adapted, and found ways to make texting more appropriate for communication over long timescales.

I call this correspondence texting: longer, infrequent messages closer to letters, taking place over months or years. This is in contrast to "instant texting," composed of short, frequent texts.

Over the rest of this post, I'll cover ways to make correspondence texting easier by a) making it easier for me to respond b) making it easier for the other person to respond c) making it easier to peruse old texts later and d) choosing when to not correspondence text.⁴

(If you are going to read one tip, read Tip 4.)

A. Making it easier for me to respond

My central goal in this section is to respond with pauses but consistently.

The primary challenge is consistent responses: if I'm maintaining more than a couple conversations, I cannot respond every day to each of them. However, the way texting is designed, old messages are quickly buried. So how do I remember to respond?

Tip 1: Triage your texts:
I keep three buckets: immediate, within 24 hours, and correspondence. If you are planning a party tonight, you need to be replying quickly! (The rest of the tips will ignore the first two categories).

Tip 2: Give yourself permission to respond less frequently for correspondence:
This may be obvious, but it's worth communicating to yourself and the other person. The value of correspondence texting comes over the course of months/years, so infrequent responses are still valuable.
Having less frequent responses means that your texts can be a little longer. Don't feel weird about that!

Tip 3: Consider responding to a lot of texts at once:
Most of the time, I find it hard to reply to texts. Every once in a while, though, I'll respond to a text or two. I find it really helps to turn these occasions into texting sessions for as long as they'll go. I often respond to 6 or 7 people over the course of 30 minutes to an hour.⁵
A more organized person might want to schedule these times, but it can be helpful to harness your spontaneity. These sessions are also good in liminal spaces (bus rides/on planes) where you have a chunk of time and not much else to do.⁶

Tip 4: Respond oldest to newest (only applies to correspondence):
This has been very important for me.
If I respond to correspondence texts in whatever order I please, I tend to miss some conversations, particularly those which are awkward in some way (e.g. I'm not quite sure how to respond). I also tend to respond to newer texts because those are easier to access.
Having a (loose) rule of responding to my oldest texts first helps a lot with making sure I don't miss replies.⁷ This also makes it easier to follow Tip 3, because there is a clear "next person" to respond to.
If doing this with all texts is too much, choose a cutoff. (For me, that is January 1, 2025).

Tip 5: Visually mark un-responded texts:
The simplest way is to keep them unread. (With iOS, you can tap texts "unread").⁸

Tip 6: If you want to time a message, consider schedule sending the text:
On iOS, you can schedule your text up to two weeks in the future.⁹ This may be possible with other texting platforms (e.g. WhatsApp), but I have not tried it.

B. Making it easier for the other person to respond

As the song goes, "it may be two to tango/but boy, it's one to let go..."¹⁰.

Tip 7: End every¹¹ response with at least one question:
I generally ask either simple questions about their life ("what's something you're looking forward to?") or about what they just said. Concrete open-ended questions generally work best; it should be easy to respond to yet give enough material for natural follow-up questions.
These questions can feel a little bit stale. I find it helpful to remember my primary goal -- get to know the other person better -- and to ask things that I'm genuinely curious about.¹²

Tip 8: If someone hasn't responded in a while, feel free to reach out again!:
Of course, make sure people feel comfortable
In many circles, there is a social norm against "double texting." While healthy, it can prematurely end conversations where one person forgets to respond. In my experience, I have many of my friends because I consistently reached out even when other conversations had lapsed. In general, I've found reaching out (without replying) is an important tool for correspondence.¹³
Often, I'll have some reason to reach out to a friend (e.g. asking for feedback/saying happy birthday) which doesn't depend on our earlier texts.¹⁴ If I don't (and it's been a bit since we last talked), I'll still ask a new question I'm curious about.¹⁵

Tip 9: Tailor response length to your recipient:
This varies person to person. I like longer texts because they communicate more information, but they are also harder to respond to. For some friends, this is about two "pages" of texting; for others, it's a couple of paragraphs.
I don't have any good rules of thumb; I think this a trial and error thing.

C. Making it easier to see old texts

One lovely thing about letters and emails is that each stands on their own. You can open a drawer, or your inbox, and immediately be transported to the past. With texting, this is a lot harder. I'm less certain about these tips, but they might be useful?¹⁶

Tip 10: Consider sending more pictures?:
Pictures encapsulate points in time. Some messaging platforms (like iMessage) will compile all of the pictures in a conversation, and this can be one way to get a broad view of texting history.

Tip 11: Download your texts to a more readable format:
iMazing is a computer application that allows you to access iPhone data. I used it to download all of my texts as a pdf (and csv). It can be unwieldy though: my history with one friend went to 2200 pages! Some platforms (like WhatsApp) allow you to export the chat from within the app, but I don't have an exhaustive list.¹⁷
Screenshotting important conversations can also work, but it doesn't scale well.

Tip 12: Use another platform?:
My friend Maria recommended Discord when I asked, because it apparently has better search tools.

D. Know when not to text

I don't have concrete tips here, but it's helpful to remember that other media exist! I exchange emails with a couple of friends, and primarily call others.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to use one of those other forms of media by leaving a comment or emailing me at kai at liquidbrain [dot] net!¹⁸

Notes