A question for HN for a hypothetical feature: What if the Slack client app had "ambient awareness" such that it suppressed notifications when the active window with focus is an IDE like MS Visual Studio, JetBrains, Xcode, emacs, etc. Would that help you?
Basically, it would work similar to Slack's "Do Not Disturb" feature[1]. DND could be expanded beyond "hours" to include a list of apps that shouldn't be interrupted.
Once a programmer switches away from the code IDE to the email program, that's the point the Slack chat notifications would appear. The idea is that programmers already sort of interrupt themselves[2] but since that timing is controlled by the programmer, a Slack notification is less stressful. Thoughts?
>Since work never happens in a vacuum, I would be happy to have only a single realtime notification tool (OpsGenie/PagerDuty) that sends notifications to poeple currently on-call, and only about problems that require realtime attention.
I don't use chat apps at work these days but when I did, I put AOL AIM, Yahoo Messenger, etc inside of a virtual machine that was minimized on screen. That way, everybody saw that I was "online" but their notifications were blocked behind the vm instead of making it to my desktop's taskbar. The vm acted like a firewall. I could then look at chat messages on my own schedule at my leisure -- typically once or twice and hour. For workplaces that expect you to reply to chat messages in 5 seconds, this hack won't work.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=slack+do+not+di...