Comment by bitexploder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bitexploder | Hacker News Reader

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It is Cmd+Q for me. Tongue in cheek here, but you have the power. You have permission from me, bitexploder to close Slack and work for focused periods of 1-2 hours. Seriously though, it may be a little uncomfortable. If it seems to cause friction with colleagues just explain it. Ensure you block out time to be responsive, respond, and help others out. Slack should be a "help if I can" avenue not demand of your attention. I call it digest mode. Open once every hour or two when I am thinking hard. Email the same. Some mornings I let everyone know I am heads down and will come up for air and help out with things in the afternoon.

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.

> Our addiction to instant and easy answers can be very problematic.

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."

I have spent some long weekends in the woods trying to be very still. Not meditatong really, just being bored and thinking. I think it helps me be okay being stuck for a while. Cal Newport discusses this in his book. Getting comfortable with boredom and short Internet embargos (among other things)

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.

This solution works less well when there are actual emergencies.

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.

Slack is one of those sneaky things that can subvert culture or quasi-define it if a stronger force does not exert itself. We make it a policy that emergencies happen via telephone. We want people to be able to ignore Slack for a while and not be worried about something important popping up.

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.

That would work for others, but my problem isn't external, it is internal. I would just re-open slack.

Why quit the app vs set your status to busy/DND?

I am lazy and I like for it to be 100% out of my mind. No seeing it on cmd+tab, etc. No temptation to stop by Slack as I change apps.

spotlight and a fast machine make it a few keystrokes to come back.

But given those issues, it seems the only reasonable approach is to practice the needed discipline to not do so. It can be difficult and uncomfortable, but possible for most people.

I think we agree in spirit. My argument is more about something like decision fatigue. There is simply a mental cost to even glancing at a distracting thing that you have struggled with. When you are first building a discipline you lack, even the smallest factors like that can overwhelm you, especially if your bucket of decision making power is all used up later in the day.

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.

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