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

It's a common problem, probably most common name for it is "information overload". There is a new skill needed today where you need to find ways of dealing with the "signal vs noise" problem. There is just so much information that if you try to take in everything, you'll be overloaded. Instead, you need to figure out some way of filtering incoming information so more "signal" than "noise" gets through to you. I'm sure having ADHD makes this a lot harder too.

Rather than giving you some specific advice, best advice I have for you is to lookup existing resources that deal with "information overload", try searching for that on your favorite search engine.

In the past, there been a lot of threads on HN as well with good advice that you can browse through, probably you'll find at least one idea that can help you a bit. Here is an example search for "Ask HN information overload" sorted by score: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

That sounds like an absolute nightmare.

Is your management chain aware that you are diagnosed with ADHD? Staying off Slack should be considered a very reasonable accommodation for your condition. Perhaps go ahead and do it, but also tell them why, and how it will improve your productivity.

Alternatively maybe it's time to look for a different job with a more appropriate working environment, one that doesn't lead to such stress. How have you found previous jobs, in terms of being able to focus?

Mute the notifications. Or even just close slack. Break projects into tasks. Finish one task at a time, then check slack/email.

> I don't want to be that person that's not reachable but more and more, I'm thinking about closing Slack and opening it 2-3x a day.

What's wrong with that? That's how many people work with Slack (myself included). I don't answer whenever someone asks me something; I answer in a specific allocated timeslot during the day (2 to be precise: the very first thing in the morning, and 2h before finishing my day)

I ran into this issue at a large corp. I was a subject matter expert on how a certain product worked so literally would get 500+ notifications daily from (mostly sales) people asking the same questions. I set an auto-reply to anyone that mentioned me that included a link to FAQ and directed them to SEs or CS folks who were responsible for answering these sort of questions. I also linked a recording to the last webinar where I went over what's new and answered questions and a link to the next upcoming one. In the auto-response I set the expectation that a response from could take up to 5 days. This more or less solved that issue.

As for my own channel surfing to avoid working. That's a WIP. Best advice I can give is to maintain a task list. When you catch yourself surfing, go to the task list and see if there is something you can knock off.