Mute all the channels. Ignore messages that don't matter. Configure it to notify you if someone mentions "lunch". Done.<p>Coworkers aren't your friends. Don't have FOMO on their Slack postings.
> It’s a bit like the way everyone gravitates towards the kitchen at a house party.<p>I've solved this problem by dimming or turning off the lights in all the rooms I don't want people to hang out in and having brighter lighting in the room I want people to stay in. It works wonders.
I don't disagree with the article's premise that Slack hijacks your brain, but as someone who worked for a far-flung company that didn't have Slack, and instead relied on email/phone/web meetings, I NEVER want to go back to that.
When does a conversation stop being about a tool or a platform and become about how it's used?<p>Slack is not perfectly opinionated. It does not enforce a single way of working on everyone that uses it. One of the weakest areas I have found on HN has been discussion around organizations and how they function. New tools, like Slack, open new doors, but they are not silver bullets. Switching to Slack doesn't solve inherent organizational problems, bad organizational habits, poor management practices, or unrealistic (or misaligned) expectations.<p>We don't blame email for the emails your boss sends you at 2 in the morning.
I'm very distractible, and I get on fine with Slack. I genuinely feel work is easier with it, you just have to aggressively filter the attention-grabbing. My strategy is: notifications for mentions and ultra-important channels only, mute any channel I don't want to definitely read all of (joining a channel and immediately muting is common for me), disable the unread dot completely for non-primary teams, and unsubscribe from threads as soon as I'm done in them.<p>As mentioned elsewhere, if I don't want to do something straight away, I star it for the next morning's run through my starred list, or if it's more particular than that set a reminder or something. It's really not too bad.
Sadly, artificial urgency is the status quo of modern application design and development. A successful app often takes several cues from gambling, wherein the user gets a dopamine hit with a new notification, and is encouraged to check periodically for the possibility of another hit.
Slack for work mostly sucks. It's OK for communities where urgency is obviously not there -- basically as an alternative IRC. I have worked at a couple companies that used IRC. They beauty of IRC is no offline notifications (unless you're using a cloud service, I guess) -- so it was only used during the workday.<p>I'm not sure if this is the case with other teams, but I've been noticing my team has been using public channels less and less lately, and I guess most slack-based communication must happen in private messages. We could probably change to a traditional IM client and not have to deal with Slack anymore.
> "What lures people to Slack in the first place is its ability to manufacture an artificial sense of urgency..."<p>I think it would be far more accurate to say that it's due to a lack of other products that as easy to use for so many.<p>I've considered putting my internet savvy parents on Slack, and they are well into their retirement years.<p>I don't think Slack is addicting as much as most humans enjoy contact with other humans. We are wired to be social. It helped us survive and thrive. Slack et al is simply a symptom of that wiring.
While I agree with this article in general, I do believe the distractiveness of Slack can be mitigated by disabling notifications on certain channels while keeping them open on others.
The killer feature of slack is that alerts are highly configurable and work properly across devices - it lets you eliminate unnecessary and duplicated alerts
I never really understood the hype around Slack. I keep reading articles like this one, I constantly hear people saying "zomg we transitioned to Slack and are having such an awesome time, it's way better then [insert messaging app]!".<p>I'm probably getting old, but I've been using it for about 3-4 years now (because work) and it seems just like a polished IRC client tied to a proprietary service to me.
I love the bot integration with Slack... the ability to follow git commits, build errors, new user signups in an aggregate event view.<p>Plus, having the ability to comment in response to system events.<p>But I've worked with some Slack teams that spend hours attempting to communicate via animated GIFs. #InstantMute
I feel like the premise of this article is wrong because does slack really care how much you use it? Don’t they just get $$$ per seat. They just want businesses to keep buying. This is opposed to Facebook where their business is keeping users engaged.
I think personal comms + general channel announcements are OK. Just close slack and when you come back check any specific communications for you asynchronously, or if you want to catch up on "what's been up" you can browse message threads.<p>On the other hand @here/@channel messages are terrible! Now these are terrible because they confuse the "broadcast" nature messages with personal messages.
>> I have probably spent thousands of hours of my life using it. And yet I have absolutely nothing tangible to show for this.<p>It seems we should have at least as much to show as other forms of group comms tools.<p>Re urgency : same applies. a group should set standards for urgency based on various human and project needs. Point is these should be set my people not the tool.
You also have to take into account is that chatting is how the younger colleagues want to collaborate. Just like email replaced phone calls, chat apps are supplanting email. What's next? Bots.