Suggestions welcome.
Our addiction to instant and easy answers can be very problematic. It is the only way. Some of the time when I feel the urge for distractions or chat or email I just sit with one or two apps open (Editor and music) and I sit there until the boredom wins and the task becomes more appealing. Once that hurdle is overcome things are great.
Bingo. The rub between not wanting to reinvent the wheel and being forced to think through it on your own is a very real tension. However, I really like what you say here. The notion of instant information and instant gratification has made us primarily information consumers. There's a very real benefit, in my opinion, to thinking through the situation without the external information inputs.
Both are good, but my sense (from anecdotal evidence, primarily) is that we're losing the thinking/reasoning our way through things in favor of "collaboration" which we cheapen as "information sharing."
When I am hacking on Go or Python I will often launch pydoc or godoc and not visit the Internet at large for hours. Some times I end up implemeting something un-idiomatic or sub optimal. I think it is alright. You get a feel for when something should go to a Parking Lot that you can clear out in a bit. It may seem counterintuitive but it does not mess up Flow. Just whack a comment or placeholder and move on. I often find my brain was working on it in the background anyhow.
It is a sort of freedom. A rare sort these days.
spotlight and a fast machine make it a few keystrokes to come back.
I have been on this agenda of simplifying my computing over the last couple of years and it has really made a difference. I don't need a special app for TODOs. I don't need yet another status bar agent pestering me to update itself. I don't need an IM client begging for my attention. We are builders and problem solvers, and we are paid to think really hard. Our computers and phones are devices that have a default mode that guides us toward content consumption and a bunch of "least bad" technologies.
You can, however, configure slack to not notify you unless you are @'d specifically. This + minimizing slack is pretty effective. Most of our office works with this set up (so some people need to be pinged directly to get immediate responses)
People might need to know, but I think that the word spreads fast. For non-urgent stuff, talk in the channel. For urgent things, @ someone, or DM them.
The only thing you need then is the self control to not look at Slack every 30 seconds.
It can be hard when that is not an option because then someone has to let Slack occupy some amount of their brain space, just in case.
Personally, I use mutt + mbsync. I have bound key 0 to call mbsync from mutt. I try to check email only twice per day [1].
I'm in the process of switching to gnus + mbsync. This has the additional advantage of gnus being close to a news reader, which is optimized for an inbox-zero way of reading.
Since my email often carries stressful news, I love having my inbox "paused". I pull emails. They are not pushed to me. Way saner.
[1] http://pmarchive.com/guide_to_personal_productivity.html