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

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

#321

Post by Falkon1313 »

smileybarry wrote: post #45

I tweak my Slack pretty heavily to suit my ADHD but 90% of it is: turn off (desktop) notifications entirely. Not "sometimes", all of it. (I just set Windows to DND so I still get Slack's red dot) I notice the red dot as soon as it appears anyway, but the lack of bigger visuals & audio means if I'm actually focused (and don't notice the red dot) I don't get yanked out of it. The other 10% is: * Mute unnecessary channe…

Exactly this! Mute channels, adjust your notifications, and if it's still annoying, just turn it off. You can always turn it back on and check it when you're ready and it's time to talk with people.

I think I have mine set so I only get pinged if there's a direct @ mention of my name. Sometimes I miss some stuff, but also, I get to miss stuff. If it's important, someone will ping me directly.

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

#322

Post by noir_lord »

danShumway wrote: post #261
zztop44 wrote: post #144

I don’t have ADHD but I get very distracted by Slack. Here’s what worked for me. 1. Slack app uninstalled on my phone. If I need it for something, I install it, use it, then delete again. 2. Slack app on my laptop fully closed by default. 3. Set times (about 5 a day) to check in and respond to notifications and scan channels. When I was a senior manager with lots of actually important messages these blocks were about…

This is all great advice (especially "uninstall it from your phone"). I'll add to this that if anyone involved with Slack is around here, Slack is in desperate need of more powerful/flexible muting controls -- ie, not just muting notifications from specific channels/DMs, but actually doing things like suppressing visual indicators in the sidebar, muting during certain time periods, etc... You want to go wild, it woul…

I just want coloured notifications in the task tray beyond cyan and magenta.

Lot of notifications are automatic slack bots but without looking I don't know if it's a git pr or a human.

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

#324

Post by dalbasal »

I have ADD. Diagnosed medicated 30 years ago as a child. Slack distraction isn't my specific achilles heel, but I think I get it.

What works for me is breaking up workdays into 3-4 parts. I physically move, rearrange my desk, restart my laptop, take breaks, close files and such to punctuate day parts and keep them distinct. I need a lot more than a timer to make this work.

Once I have the day split into distinct parts, I can deal with 2hr blocks at a time, rather than a whole workday. Whatever your specific difficulties are, I find they're more tractable within a 2hr block. Maybe you allocate 30m to slack and then close it.

I tend to "lay out my tools." Open only the files and apps that I need for the current block, print out my notes, stuff like that. Imagine laying out tools and parts before starting to assemble a piece of IKEA furniture. Then you put that stuff away, grab some other stuff, and start to work on fixing the sink.

The details are emergent. At least for me, this method is useful in the abstract. Whether the issue is slack, procrastination, big getting in the way of small or the reverse... I seem to find solutions much more readily within these smaller blocks of time.

I don't know if what works for me will work for you, but if it does... the way it works is that solutions to problems like your slack problem are easier to find when you just need to solve them for the next couple of hours.

I find I spend a lot of mental effort trying for big solutions to big problems, and besides medication, very few big solutions stick. Small solutions otoh.. seem to emerge once the framing is correct.

Also, not everyone is cut out for highly collaborative work. I'm not. I need decent size blocks of work that I can take and own. I'm just not reliable enough to have others depend on my work on a "by lunchtime" schedule. That doesn't mean I can't collaborate. I have managed teams and worked in people roles. I just can't work and have a conversation simultaneously. Instead, I will allocate a whole 2 hr block of time to pair programming-like modes.

If your solutions are good and you have confidence in them, workplaces tend to be flexible enough to contain them.

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

#325

Post by nicbou »

danShumway wrote: post #261
zztop44 wrote: post #144

I don’t have ADHD but I get very distracted by Slack. Here’s what worked for me. 1. Slack app uninstalled on my phone. If I need it for something, I install it, use it, then delete again. 2. Slack app on my laptop fully closed by default. 3. Set times (about 5 a day) to check in and respond to notifications and scan channels. When I was a senior manager with lots of actually important messages these blocks were about…

This is all great advice (especially "uninstall it from your phone"). I'll add to this that if anyone involved with Slack is around here, Slack is in desperate need of more powerful/flexible muting controls -- ie, not just muting notifications from specific channels/DMs, but actually doing things like suppressing visual indicators in the sidebar, muting during certain time periods, etc... You want to go wild, it woul…

This is something that's also sorely missing from operating systems.

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

#327

Post by tetha »

lynchdt wrote: post #25

I work mostly with Engineering teams, and consider slack inbound a pathology. Slack is great for collab in places, but it’s not a strong way to manage inbound, IMO. The teams I’m responsible for make it easy for their stakeholder to raise issues, asks in a more deliberate, calmer way e.g. via GitHub issues or manager email. In exchange, we commit to mutually agreed response times on certain categories of business cri…

Indeed, very much this. We spent some efforts structuring this at work and now we have 2-3 rules in place. First off, all requests for work and services are always issues either directly in the ticket system, or via mail to a central mail address. Nothing from chat will reliably trigger any work done.

However, we have defined a role "first contact". This role rotates on a weekly basis, and whoever is first contact has the job of monitoring some well-known channels for requests. They then act as a first level support pretty much, helping people to figure out how to best request what they need. They also handle mails that aren't automatically handled in the central mailbox.

The latter in turn enables the team to just ignore pretty much all chat notifications outside of the team. First contact person will ensure they are heard, and first contact person will also address high severity tickets directly to people after creation. And as much as that sounds like a slower process, it has improved our resolution times because people aren't distracted as much.

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

#329

Post by lynchdt »

Tagbert wrote: post #50
lynchdt wrote: post #25

I work mostly with Engineering teams, and consider slack inbound a pathology. Slack is great for collab in places, but it’s not a strong way to manage inbound, IMO. The teams I’m responsible for make it easy for their stakeholder to raise issues, asks in a more deliberate, calmer way e.g. via GitHub issues or manager email. In exchange, we commit to mutually agreed response times on certain categories of business cri…

I'm curious about what you mean by "inbound". It sounds like messages from someone "outside" but not sure if that is probably a limited definition.

I mean sources of incoming work, could be a quick question, an ask for something, automated alarm or a bug.

Slack makes it super hard to stay on top of this and systematically triage the low from the high value.

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

#330

Post by anshumankmr »

>1000+ channels and my team is tagged in a lot of stuff so I get a lot of notifications.

As someone with ADHD, I really love Slack despite the pestering with notifications (I used to switch off notifications). We used it my previous organization. However, I really came to appreciate it as in my current org, we use Google Chat .

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