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I'd vote to have no notifications (of any kind) from chat & messaging tools as the default. This too especially at work to reduce overload of multi-tasking. Even showing the number of messages on an icon in the taskbar is very distracting.

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The downside of no notifications is that you must manually check for changes

I got on this train when I got my first iPhone. I turned off every notification except the ringer (no one calls me except free cruise spam, so maybe I should silence that).

At work, I disable all Slack messages and check Slack in my slack time. Email gets checked at 9AM and 4:30P.

It’s glorious.

Sounds glorious indeed! But what do you do when you need to send an email at 11:30? Do you send without looking? Or do you just wait until the next send window?

I'm genuinely interested in this because by far the most time-intensive distractor in my job is answering email. When I look at email at 9am I am usually busy replying until 10 at least. Then I get some work done which I need to send off by email at 11:30, seeing that I have 20 new emails of which 10 are somewhat relevant and 1 needs a reply.

I try to avoid the trap of the inbox if possible. If something is an emergency I’ll go log in, otherwise I keep a Apple Note with a checklist that I can add quick little blurbs to remind me of emails I need to write later.

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