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Comment by jasonzwalker | Hacker News Reader

I have to use Slack at work, and it is fun.

But when I'm trying to focus on programming, it is like being in an all day long meeting without an agenda.

It can be very distracting. My analogy is that Slack removes all meetings and emails. You instead have 1000 micro meetings and 1000 micro emails that you have to context switch in and out of all day.

My only recourse on some days is to shut down the app on my desktop, and let my iPhone ping me if I get a DM or mention. @here messes it all up, but I've found a way to at-a-glance determine if it's directed to me without losing much concentration.

Has anyone else gotten a good way to merge things like slack/email with Pomodoro or other focus hacks?

This involves that your channels are setup sanely, but I just selectively mute/unmute on a per channel basis, and try to encourage not using @here among my coworkers. I have a textexpander macro for the `/dnd 30 minutes` for my Pomodoro.

> The @here mention lets you notify just the team members in a channel who are currently active in Slack. @here is best for sending announcements relevant to team members that are currently working or available.

If anyone else had to Google it.

Slack does have a "Snooze" and "Do Not Disturb" setting, in case you weren't aware -> https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/214908388-Do-Not-Di... .

This alone makes Slack far more useful for me than HipChat.

Thanks for the reminder - I often forget to use those (or properly). Any good ways you've found to automate pomo timer set/rest/reset through bots?

Some days, HN is like a Twitter rehash: https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/700314634939543552?lan...

Same situation for me. I disable notifications for everything but direct messages.

Sometimes I'll exit it entirely for an hour or two, but I don't want to look like I'm unavailable to help teammates.

I successfully convinced my coworkers to run Slack like old IRC where you just dumped to one channel and there is no urgency to immediately reply, instead whenever we have the time can go through the history and respond. Cut down on meme spam and other interruptions. It also relaxes junior team members since they don't worry about interrupting somebody to ask questions. If it's something catastrophic we can just call each other.

I use emacs-slack and dunst to display the notifications for just long enough to read them. No flashing, no beeping, just a simple text box. And I don't reply or jump into a conversation unless it passes a threshold of importance, or I need to step away from work for a few minutes.

It's HipChat where I work, but the end effect is the same. I've gotten myself trained to ignore the HipChat noise to the point that now when someone does message me about something important, I sometimes miss it.

> like being in an all day long meeting without an agenda.

By far the best summary of the "slack effect" that I've come across.

can't you just close/mute it when you're trying to focus? i thought that was the whole point of slack

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