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

I’d go further and suggest turning off _all_ sounds and vibrations your phone period, including for calls.

If that’s a bit extreme, do it for work hours, but turning them off completely is life changing. With them on, it’s too easy for your phone to dominate your attention.

Your phone needs to be something you give attention to on your own terms, as a tool that you control.

You might wonder about urgent alerts, like waiting for an important call or on call notifications. Your habits simply change to give the appropriate amount of attention, like a quick glance every now and then at an interval of your choosing. And, more often than not, an urgent call can be called back.

80% of my team is located in India while I’m in the US so none of our working hours overlap (meetings are scheduled early US time / late India time). Stuff can still get done without same-day responses.

Turn off notifications. Don't have Slack visible all the time.

Stop working on multiple things at the same time (unless you really know what you're doing and can handle it; tip: you probably don't and can't).

Have an actual process behind your tickets. Tickets are never directly assigned to anyone by the reporters; on that route lies madness. Have someone triage the tickets and prioritize them. Lesser prio tickets will just have to wait, a human can offer a finite amount of work per time unit.

Slack is no substitute for actually having order in things. Slack is not a ticketing system or even a good system for assigning work, and it most definitely is not a project manager or a scrum master. It's just a chat system, treat it like that.

I for one cannot live with notifications enabled in anything. I turn everything off by default. All sounds, all blinking little shits and bubbles which pop up constantly -- there's NO NEED for anyone to suffer at the mercy of attention-begging engagement gadgets.

I check Slack and such when I have the mental bandwidth available to process whatever is in them, usually when I have some minutes (e.g. after kicking off flashing or a build, running a long grep). Then, I do a quick sweep to check things.

I use a form of Eisenhower matrix. Urgent/non-important: if you can delegate, do so; if not, "please file a ticket/comment on the ticket". Non-urgent/non-important: IGNORE. The important/non-urgent goes to the personal prio-2 TODO list to check later. The urgent/important: if I'm working on it, these become do-it-nows in a prio-1 TODO list. Otherwise they go to prio-2 TODO list to check later.

TODO lists are best in free form bullets/tickboxes, either electronically or on paper. I wouldn't use a phone app unless you really need the mobility.