Reply time to instant messages is extremely context sensitive. If I'm having a chat catching up with an old friend I haven't talked with much in a while, I might take several hours to a day or two to write the next message. If I take a day or two to reply to my spouse's inquiry of "what is the plan for dinner tonight?" or "you need to pick up the kids from school today, ok?" I'll have some problems!
Your kids getting picked up shouldn't depend on you seeing an instant message, that should probably be agreed upon the previous day. Sure, emergencies happen, in which case you can't really be held responsible. But if that happens more often than not, that's bad parenting.
Or maybe your agreement with your spouse is to communicate over instant message about managing these daily tasks, in which case it's ok, but you better crank that notification sound all the way to 11 LOL
Ok, feel free to rephrase "you need to" to "will you", and have the only real reason why you didn't respond be because you just didn't feel like responding at that moment. It'll still be frustrating having the other party just be willfully absent to the conversation.
My point is, there are types of messages which are highly time sensitive to the point where the response is meaningless past a certain point, and to many in this day and age instant messaging is the format for such inquiries to be made. Sure, one could be busy and be unable to respond, and one should be understanding of that. But it the reason why my spouse was unreachable was because they didn't bother responding to me at that moment to an obviously important time critical message we've got some problems in our relationship to figure out.
> My point is, there are types of messages which are highly time sensitive to the point where the response is meaningless past a certain point
Ah yes, understood. That makes total sense. In fact I was thinking about a practical system that could be used to bypass silent modes and do not disturb configs for such emergencies. Back when MSN was a thing you had a buzz button that would play an alarm, vibrate the chat window and steal the window focus. It was as amusing as it was annoying, but there are practical uses for this.
