Think about the frequency of your correspondence.
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Put your phone on airplane mode or turn it off for a period of time. Begin with an hour, try working up to half a day. When an idea comes to you for a message to a friend, write it down in a notebook rather than sending it right away.
What happens in the absence of an immediate response from that friend? Do you end up rewording the original text? Thinking of the next thing to say?
When that period of time is over, turn your phone back on and send the message you’ve drafted.
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Cal Newport, in Digital Minimalism (2019), advocates a similar practice that he calls “consolidate texting.” He quotes Sherry Turkle, who writes, “Phones have become woven into a fraught sense of obligation in friendship. . . . Being a friend means being ‘on call’—tethered to your phone, ready to be attentive, online.” But for Newport, “to shirk your duty to be ‘on call’ [for friends] . . . would be a serious abdication.” So Newport recommends keeping your phone in Do Not Disturb mode by default—or turning off notifications of any kind for texts—and only replying to texts in bulk, during choice moments in the day:
When you’re in this mode, text messages become like emails: if you want to see if anyone has sent you something, you must turn on your phone and open the app. You can now schedule specific times for texting—consolidated sessions in which you go through the backlog of texts you received since the last check, sending responses as needed and perhaps even having some brief back-and-forth interaction before apologizing that you have to go, turning the phone back to Do Not Disturb mode, and continuing with your day.
. . . They’re still able to send you questions and get back a response in a reasonable amount of time, or send you a reminder and be sure that you’ll see it. But these more asynchronous and logistical interactions no longer give off the approximate luster of true conversation. The result is that both of you will be more motivated to fill this void with better interaction, as the relationship will seem strained in the absence of back-and-forth dialogue. Being less available over text, in other words, has a way of paradoxically strengthening your relationship even while making you (slightly) less available to those you care about.