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

If you (or you and a group of allies) have the ability to influence your company's Slack culture, the following can help.

1) No one should ever @channel unless they absolutely positively need everybody's attention immediately that very moment. "The website is down! All hands on deck!" "There's a rabid raccoon loose in the office! Evacuate!" @here is slightly less awful but should still be used sparingly.

2) If you need someone's attention, @mention them. If you do require a group's attention, @here the appropriate channel. If you do this consistently, people can disable notifications for non-mentions and assume that any channel that has unreads but no mentions may be read at their leisure - instead of having to constantly keep up with dozens of conversations.

3) Use and teach people to use highlight words so they can get notifications of conversation topics that require their presence, and ignore other unread channels.

4) Set aside a channel or two for global or large-group announcements that aren't necessarily urgent. "We're ordering t-shirts. Tell the office manager what size you want." "Our phone system has a scheduled outage next Tuesday from 2-4pm."

5) The larger your organization and the busier your Slack, the more granular you need your channels to be. For instance, in a company of 5-10, you might have a single channel for all discussions of product, and another for sales, marketing, and partnerships. In a larger company you'll need to separate out channels for client vs server engineering; for engineering vs design; for engineering and design vs QA, and more. Don't make your designers try to filter out what content is relevant for them in a combined design and engineering channel or force your QA folks to ignore a whole bunch of technobabble in order to find the discussions that are relevant to them. Don't be afraid to break out project-specific channels too. If a conversation crosses boundaries, only then bring it to a more general channel.

1. Mute channels aggressively.

2. Snooze notifications often during the day.

3. Disable the red dot badge icon in the Slack app for any new messages (including the ones not addressed to you). This was the biggest source of distraction for me in Slack.

It's what I do with a lot of services these days. I'm selective about what services can actually push to me.

Examples of services that are important enough to push to me include iMessage (large group chats muted), Uber/UberEats, Lyft, Instacart, etc. Basically notifications that are immediately actionable or important in the moment. Lots of delivery services fall into this category.