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Comment by jmadsen | Hacker News Reader

I dunno. I use Slack for a couple of groups as well as my full-time remote work.

I turn off all notifications & just check from time to time. I have a project manager who tends to pester me with DMs a little too much, but if I'm trying to concentrate I just turn it off.

I'm 50 years old & still "pre-internet" in much of my thinking, but I don't have a smartphone, turn off ALL notifications and then turn them on one-by-one on a need only basis, and still can't figure out why people have so much trouble managing their internet lives.

It's not the tool that's causing your problems.

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I have a policy that if an app sends a single undesired notification, I disable its notifications forever.

That even Google violates its own Android notification guidelines is annoying.

Some really good mainstream apps will violate at least once, and then you'll have to ask whether following your rule or breaking it leads to better futures.

Turning of all notifications is the key, I think. I have a single type of notification enabled which is able to interrupt me, and that is the vibrator on my phone when somebody calls. Everything else I only check when I feel like it, which is fine. Notifications are really overrated.

> still can't figure out why people have so much trouble managing their internet lives.

I know it sounds really crochety, but I 100% agree. It's getting pretty tiresome to see people continue to put most of their blame onto their tools instead of their habits. It doesn't take that much maturity and self-awareness to realize that certain tools can be double-edged, and that their value sometimes requires a little bit of conscious thought about their usage.

I'd say the main difference with chat tools like Slack (vs examples like Facebook) is that I can't get certain people to wrap their heads around how not to abuse them, but it's been pretty easy to ask those people politely once or twice to adhere to basic etiquette around messaging and then simply mute them after that.

agree. probably many people find out that it can be really addictive _after_ they've become really addicted :)

That's possible, I guess. The reason I'm skeptical of the addiction explanation is that I don't think I'm much better at willpower or resisting addictive behavior than the average person, but it's possible I'm selling myself short

Depending on the type of work, setting (office, remote) and circumstances, tools like Slack become necessary. And when collectively used well with agreements, it becomes valuable. The tool is not the cause, I agree.

Getting off Slack was an experiment to surface its benefits and drawbacks. Although I am content with being offline that does not preclude a scenario where I check Slack once or twice a day, as I do with email. The onus is on the user to manage their tools.

"It's not the tool that's causing your problems."

I very much disagree. Tools generate different expectations. For example, an email can be responded in a few days, an instant message not. If you company expects you to be reachable by instant message versus email, you have to react faster, and possibly have more trouble managing what you call their internet lives.

(for entirely different reasons, I just switched back to HTML version of GMail. Amazing the amount of RAM it uses & the completely unnecessary number of connections & push notifications it clutters you with. I suggest you try it for a few days.)

Figured this out at 30. You control the tool, the tool shouldn't control you.

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