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Ask HN: What to do when Slack gets too disruptive?

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Re: Ask HN: What to do when Slack gets too disruptive?

#11

Post by brandur »

Your best bet might be to be less responsive on Slack — not only by not responding to everyone immediately, but by not responding to some Slack messages at all. If it's important, the person who pinged you can submit their request via another medium, hopefully in a longer form format like email or bug report that's more thoughtfully considered and thoroughly researched, and which you can reply/fix quickly without spending 10 to 30 minutes of your work day in tight synchronous communication.

It's sort of a bad thing to do, but you will start getting fewer Slack messages. People have an implicit understanding of who's likely to respond in a timely manner, and somewhat ironically, it's the most responsive people who have to improve their responsiveness even more because by being responsive they'll get even more messages and interruptions.

On a meta note, it continues to surprise me that more people and companies aren't talking about the highly distracting effects of the software. It works great at small scale, but if you get large enough everyone's pinging everyone all the time. I recently read Deep Work by Cal Newport (excellent book by the way [1]) and couldn't help but being mildly entertained when they get into the time draining effects of email (it seems to have been written a little before Slack caught on). The distraction engine created by Slack is the SR-71's Pratt & Whitney J58 [2] compared to email's 5 HP motor out of an everyday golf cart.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Work-Focused-Success-Distracted/...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratt_%26_Whitney_J58

Re: Ask HN: What to do when Slack gets too disruptive?

#12

Post by closed »

user5994461 wrote: post #6
intermittently wrote: post #4

I'm finding this more and more during my off hours. I wish there was a way to opt out of all @channel announcements on my phone app and still get notifications for when someone tags me directly (when I'm actually needed). Probably not a helpful answer to your question, but I feel your pain, at any rate.

Did you install slack on your phone? Never install slack on your phone. Uninstall slack from your phone. It's a matter of life or death and I am not even kidding.

Could you elaborate? I'm particularly interested in the matter of life or death bit :).

Re: Ask HN: What to do when Slack gets too disruptive?

#13

Post by rouzbeh84 »

atmosx wrote: post #9

I find strange that they don't support "mute" for custom group of users, notifications or integrations. For example, I need to receive notifications from channel #servers on my mobile, but I don't want to receive ALL notifications. I'd like to have the ability to include and exclude based on source (username, integration, etc.)

They do channel specific but not the parameter specific you mention at the end there

Re: Ask HN: What to do when Slack gets too disruptive?

#15

Post by ahhhhhhhhhh »

Turn off all notifications except for mentions.

If you're getting frequent mentions that are "on-call" style "why isn't X working" or "when will X be done" or "let's meet immediately"... then your process as an organization is broken and Slack may not be the cause, just the facilitation of the problem.

Re: Ask HN: What to do when Slack gets too disruptive?

#16

Post by gm »

I defintiely feel it. On my computer, I can just quit the Slack app and that's it. But on my cell phone, unless I put the whole phone on "do not disturb", I cannot escape Slack.

The "disbale notifications on the specific channels" does not work for me, because I do not actually want to do so. I just want to not get notifications during off hours (or at meetings, family stuff, etc), and I not want to configure it (or set myself away) for every team I'm logged in (right now, that's 10 teams).

Slack needs a global "mute" button. Slack feels designed as if it's a complete surprise to the Slack devs that people might join more than one team. There is nothing about Slack that's global, other than being able to log into multiple teams on one instance of the application.

I've been waiting for a global mute button since forever, but these guys just keep assuming we're all part of only one Slack team.

Re: Ask HN: What to do when Slack gets too disruptive?

#18

Post by gm »

user5994461 wrote: post #6
intermittently wrote: post #4

I'm finding this more and more during my off hours. I wish there was a way to opt out of all @channel announcements on my phone app and still get notifications for when someone tags me directly (when I'm actually needed). Probably not a helpful answer to your question, but I feel your pain, at any rate.

Did you install slack on your phone? Never install slack on your phone. Uninstall slack from your phone. It's a matter of life or death and I am not even kidding.

Unfortunately, I'm coming to realize what you say is true. Now that I think about it, there is NO issue that negatively affects my work/life balance more than having Slack installed on my phone.

Re: Ask HN: What to do when Slack gets too disruptive?

#20

Post by lolsal »

rouzbeh84 wrote: post #14
iLemming wrote: post #2

if you're on OSX you can install an app called Muzzle. it silences all notifications

Or you can do this in the SysPref => Notifications tab

You can option-click the notifications menu to enable DND for the rest of the day.
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