Technology

I did a similar but more generalised thing since long ago, when I got my first pager (pre-mobile) in '95. I made myself a solemn promise that I would gratuitously and unapologetically use silent-mode, DnD, etc (including more recently auto-DnD every late-afternoon-to-mid-morning, even on weekends, when it became a thing) to live an almost exclusively asynchronous life. I almost never answer direct phone-calls too, often even for many of the recognised numbers. My modus operandi is this:

If it's a real emergency a call might be unavoidable, but if it's just typical-urgent it could be an SMS (key part of that acronym is Short) which I would see relatively soon. Alternatively a sensitive/private urgent requirement could be fulfilled via Signal. Otherwise email (pgp-encrypted if it has to be private) which I usually catch up with every day or two. Also I disable all non-critical realtime app-notifications entirely. Additionally whenever someone calls/emails me with an "opportunity" requiring "immediate response because they need a confirmation by yesterday!!!!1" I know that means the work is going to be like that too (absent time-management or time-discipline, bouncing between crises in parallel) so my go-to response is along the lines of "Thanks, but such a shame it's so last-minute - it would be impossible for me to properly consider this against the rest of my schedule and decide responsibly whether I could do it. I hope you find someone."

I didn't choose that for the sake of being antisocial, I chose it because I felt that "flow state" and "focus-retention while tackling complex problems" are extremely precious resources, and also increasingly rare. Most (not all) of the time if you don't push back to protect that then others won't voluntarily protect yours for you, because a lot of people only respect their own time, mental-bandwidth and priorities, and not those of others. I found that batching tasks together to grind through them in bulk without interruption is not only useful at work, but in most of the mundane/administrative parts of life too, because it minimizes the destructive effect of context-switching.

I discovered a very astute validation of this in an essay by Paul Graham "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule" https://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html