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