By the rise of the smartphone as central communicative device in everyday life, sociolinguistics has developed a growing interest in mobile communication. Until now, most of this research has focused primarily on static text log files, although this comes with two methodological limitations: First, log files obscure the temporal dynamics of the production of text messages as well as the sequential unfolding of message exchanges as perceived by participants on their screens. Second, static data do not provide any information about the ways in which participants are simultaneously involved in various interactions with different interlocutors. However, both aspects seem crucial to the everyday practices of smartphone communication, which characteristically features the temporal overlapping of simultaneous interactions—and thus overlapping of various rhythms in which these interactions unfold. From a sociolinguistic perspective, approaching this simultaneousness of rhythms seems relevant to understand how temporal patterns can unfold social meaning as a contextualization resource in everyday digital communication. The paper addresses this desideratum by investigating the temporalities of smartphone-based chats, based on an extensive sample of screen capture videos. 20 German and Swiss participants documented their smartphone communication during a period of 14 days. Additionally, interviews were conducted with all these participants. By drawing on these data, the paper investigates "through the eyes of the participants", on the one hand, the ordinary rhythms of digital interaction that are routinized as communicative and socially unremarkable and context appropriate. On the other hand, the paper focuses on moments of innovative rhythmization in which participants break through established temporal patterns, thus indexing particular communicative activities or social stances. Accordingly, the paper argues for a new methodological attention to rhythm in smartphone-based interaction that elaborates the social meaning of temporality in mediatized everyday life.