That is interesting. I have uninstalled many apps and would like to go the full route of turning off WiFi, but my team does regular communication on slack. Do you have a different communication style or would you just use desktop in that case?
Assuming you work at a desk job (like a programmer), keep work-related items off of your phone. If your superiors complain, tell them you don't want to be responsible for leaking company secrets if you happen to lose your phone. If there's an emergency, your teammates could signal you that your help is necessary via SMS, and you can use a separate device to help them out.
Don't sell your soul to your employer. I always establish this limit when starting a new position. My phone is for personal use only, and no work-related communication (business email, Slack etc.) would ever go near it.
No one is asking you to be active on chat on your personal devices all the time.
Specifically, I personally am able to keep my work stress level in balance just if I have all work communications (especially emails and slack) on my phone, so that I can take a quick look at what's happening even when I'm not working.
This doesn't mean I actually end up working after hours: in fact, 99% of the times I just skim over the push notifications in a few seconds and go back to what I was doing.
I found it to be much less stressful than having to wake up in the morning and see the massive burst of activity that happened between 5pm and 8am (especially if your team is distributed across different time zones like mine).
And God forbid if I did that when I go on a 2 weeks vacation, I actually wouldn't be able to enjoy the vacation at all because I would always be thinking about the mayhem that's waiting for me on my return. If I am able to glance at the notifications a few times a day instead and occasionally reply on some really high priority stuff, it calms me down because I can get an idea of what has been happening.
I'm not sure this is healthy, but I tried your strategy several times and it never worked for me, and this is also in different contexts (e.g. different teams and/or employers). It might also be because I have always held a position of tech lead/manager, so in general there is always a stream of people who are asking for my input on something (that being said, I heavily rely on delegation and people are fully responsible for their own decisions, but they just end up pinging me regardless because I have significant contexts about the projects).
If you need to 'get away', for real, what you really need is a sabbatical, and to hand off all your work responsibilities to other people. Then you can unplug more fully and might actually stand a chance at finding true value and connections with other people in a more extended trip to a part of the world you've never visited.
That's how some people vacation. There's a whole host of meaningful activity that falls between vacation as product and a sabbatical.
Yeah, and they have some other advantages too. Disconnecting from people is half the reason I need a break in the first place.
I'm waiting to get the opportunity to do a _complete_ sabbatical. One day.
Careless mixing of realtime chatter, async memos, and reference documentation leads to a fear of missing out. You have to wade through a stream of junk to see if you missed something important. Eventually, people even expect you to know the whole stream whether you were present or not. How mad! If something important happened during your vacation, someone in your organization should tell you about it once you return. Otherwise, you should return to a clean slate, only tracking the chatter that happens while on duty.
In the best recent office cultures I've seen, instant messaging is used without history. It's water-cooler banter or popping your head in the next office. Important but still transient things can go in email and be read a week or two later when you return, but there aren't so many of them. And stable things go in a wiki, not in email, i.e. if subsequent new hires are supposed to know about it too. Nobody should be onboarded by telling them to crawl through transcripts of previous work weeks, and a proper vacation lets you return as if you are onboarding.
By the way, early in my career, these same types of careless people abused email the way they abuse Slack today. Busy people dealt with hundreds of emails in a day, not counting spam nor automated notification messages, which weren't so common then. Your inbox would be flooded with realtime chatter, async memos, and attached documents that should have been in a repository somewhere. Eventually, those with enough clout were driven to set auto-reply messages that they are on vacation and no email received during their absence would ever be read.
For me turning off Wifi, and consciously turning it on a couple of times a day is the big difference. Just like checking mail 15 years ago. You decided when to open Eudora or Hotmail, checked mail, en closed it again.
For me any app I use is like old school mail checking. I decide when to check. My friends know it can take a couple of hours or sometimes days for me to respond. If something is really urgent, they call me :)