Ask HN: I have diagnosed ADHD and cannot work with Slack anymore – advice?

Just close it when you don't need it. It's not a problem until someone complains.

I'm challenged for 40 years with loosing myself, living above the clouds, focusing heavily on things that fascinate me, procrastinating everything else until pressure kicks in and abusing whatever Dopamine stimulating stuff comes in my way. When I was a kid nobody knew about ADHD. Some Open Source communities are on Discord (SolidJS, Axum) which is challenging for me every time I need to engage. Just reading through the stuff shifts my brain into ADHD mode. Discord is a distraction machine. Slack the same. At my workplace I'm the only person who has MS Teams *only* open for meetings. People who know me are contacting me via E-Mail for years (I read 2-3 times a day), but when I leave it open I get all kinds of spontaneous calls, notifications, etc. that I interpret as a sign that my colleagues aren't organised very well anymore. The whole Office365 suite is creeping into our company and kills peoples ability to focus or being productive. For people like us who actually *feel* the extend to which those new tools (Office365, Slack, Discord) are damaging the performance of teams and the wellbeing of every individual this trend is alarming.

My advice (mostly some general stuff), that works well for me and might help you a bit if you're not already doing this:

- Avoid to much sugar and caffeine. This is tough because it boosts our ability in the short term but kicks us above the clouds (or idle mode) after. So, best is to avoid sugar at all and reduce / control caffein. Of course no alcohol or other drugs. Cold showers really help to get started instead of 3-4 cups of coffee (me).

- Restrict your Slack time to defined time slices. Talk to your boss and team. I really recommend doing your focus work in the morning. First 4 hours of the day to do focus work. In the second half of the day do organisational stuff including reading through slack, etc.

- I'm doing Yoga Nidra for over 10 years and it restores my energy and ability to focus. Any relaxation technique should work. You might look for Andrew Huberman NSDR (Non Sleep Deep Rest) tracks or similar. For me, Pomodoro Technique works well. In the 30 minutes break I do Yoga Nidra. Andrew Huberman's podcasts about this stuff are amazing, but also a great source of distraction, of course. If I should recommend one podcast then it would be the "Focus Toolkit".

- We need to avoid distractions at all costs. Our minds are jumping after every little conscious or unconscious excitement kick. So, for your (let's say 2-4) productive ours, all this stuff needs to be shut out. Including your phone.

Last: There's been a large study that comes to the conclusion, that "a wandering mind is an unhappy mind". I find that's absolutely true. That means for us highly distractible earthlings our live goal should be seeking calmness and to do this to perform systematically actions that lead us to calmness, like doing relaxation and focus training every day.

Use a CLI with push/pull methods. Treat it like email. Check once every couple hours

> there's the anxiety of waiting like 4 hours, opening it, and seeing a bunch of critical messages you weren't around for.

Tell people to call your phone if it is urgent. Everything else can wait 4 hours, right?

There is an app for this. Reduce motion is still slow fade animation. The app was a little buggy but mostly worked like Linux tiling window managers.

The apps price was a few bucks. I can’t remember the name of it, but I’m looking an will edit if I find it.

Edit: no dice. All I can do is assure you it’s technically possible and some external WM apps out there may do it for you