<story><title>Ask HN: I have diagnosed ADHD and cannot work with Slack anymore – advice?</title><text>10 months ago, I started to work at a company that uses Slack heavily. They have 1000+ channels and my team is tagged in a lot of stuff so I get a lot of notifications.&lt;p&gt;I can&amp;#x27;t concentrate at all. It&amp;#x27;s not like it&amp;#x27;s annoying, I simply cannot work.&lt;p&gt;I have been spending 10x more energy since I started to just keep above the water but now, after 10 months, I&amp;#x27;m simply drowning and my tickets are all piling up.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t want to be that person that&amp;#x27;s not reachable but more and more, I&amp;#x27;m thinking about closing Slack and opening it 2-3x a day.&lt;p&gt;Any advice?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>zztop44</author><text>I don’t have ADHD but I get very distracted by Slack. Here’s what worked for me.&lt;p&gt;1. Slack app uninstalled on my phone. If I need it for something, I install it, use it, then delete again.&lt;p&gt;2. Slack app on my laptop fully closed by default.&lt;p&gt;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 half an hour each (for a total of about 2.5 hours a day). These days I can get away with less than 10 minutes.&lt;p&gt;4. Block these times in your calendar. At the start of the day, block out the rest of the time without meetings etc as Deep Work. People will understand you’re not easily contactable.&lt;p&gt;6. Tell your close team mates&amp;#x2F;manager that if they ever need you urgently they can contact via Signal&amp;#x2F;WhatsApp. If anyone needs you and really can’t wait a few hours then they’ll ask your manager and be able to get in touch. If you’re really worried about being uncontactable then put your phone number in your Slack bio.&lt;p&gt;Using that, I went from being totally addicted to Slack to being able to be a productive worker again. Of course your mileage may vary.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>danShumway</author><text>This is all great advice (especially &amp;quot;uninstall it from your phone&amp;quot;).&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll add to this that if anyone involved with Slack is around here, Slack is in desperate need of more powerful&amp;#x2F;flexible muting controls -- ie, not just muting notifications from specific channels&amp;#x2F;DMs, but actually doing things like suppressing visual indicators in the sidebar, muting during certain time periods, etc... You want to go wild, it would be great to be able to fully turn off channels client-side during certain periods of the day so that new messages literally won&amp;#x27;t show up until it&amp;#x27;s turned back on.&lt;p&gt;When I used Slack, if it was open and there was an indicator for a channel, I checked that channel. It didn&amp;#x27;t matter if I got a notification or not, the indicator itself was enough to distract me.&lt;p&gt;I suspect there are a lot of people who have become less productive because of issues like this. A lot of the advice in this thread mirrors the above comment where people feel like they need to completely close the app and get it out of their face entirely in order to concentrate. In my opinion that&amp;#x27;s a weakness of the muting&amp;#x2F;UI options, that the only way to really truly tame notifications for deep work in many instances is to completely block the entire app.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Edit: I consider both of these problems faced by OP (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=34018044&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=34018044&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=34014517&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=34014517&lt;/a&gt;) to be primarily UX problems that Slack could fix. Definitely the notification indicators -- putting a bright red dot on someone&amp;#x27;s screen is a distraction regardless of whether or not you also play a sound.&lt;/i&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: I have diagnosed ADHD and cannot work with Slack anymore – advice?</title><text>10 months ago, I started to work at a company that uses Slack heavily. They have 1000+ channels and my team is tagged in a lot of stuff so I get a lot of notifications.&lt;p&gt;I can&amp;#x27;t concentrate at all. It&amp;#x27;s not like it&amp;#x27;s annoying, I simply cannot work.&lt;p&gt;I have been spending 10x more energy since I started to just keep above the water but now, after 10 months, I&amp;#x27;m simply drowning and my tickets are all piling up.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t want to be that person that&amp;#x27;s not reachable but more and more, I&amp;#x27;m thinking about closing Slack and opening it 2-3x a day.&lt;p&gt;Any advice?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>zztop44</author><text>I don’t have ADHD but I get very distracted by Slack. Here’s what worked for me.&lt;p&gt;1. Slack app uninstalled on my phone. If I need it for something, I install it, use it, then delete again.&lt;p&gt;2. Slack app on my laptop fully closed by default.&lt;p&gt;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 half an hour each (for a total of about 2.5 hours a day). These days I can get away with less than 10 minutes.&lt;p&gt;4. Block these times in your calendar. At the start of the day, block out the rest of the time without meetings etc as Deep Work. People will understand you’re not easily contactable.&lt;p&gt;6. Tell your close team mates&amp;#x2F;manager that if they ever need you urgently they can contact via Signal&amp;#x2F;WhatsApp. If anyone needs you and really can’t wait a few hours then they’ll ask your manager and be able to get in touch. If you’re really worried about being uncontactable then put your phone number in your Slack bio.&lt;p&gt;Using that, I went from being totally addicted to Slack to being able to be a productive worker again. Of course your mileage may vary.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dangus</author><text>This is pretty good advice. I&amp;#x27;ll add onto this:&lt;p&gt;- Your company is idiotic in how they use Slack. With what I assume is a large company (1000+ channels) teams shouldn&amp;#x27;t have to respond to mentions with the possible exception of people directly on your team. Suggest&amp;#x2F;insist that the team implement a formal request intake system and actively discourage mentions. On my SRE team, we directly told other teams that Slack was not a method to request that work be done, and that all requests via Slack would be ignored. Our public channel was for asynchronous informational questions only (and please read the docs first). If your team has an on-call obligation, it shouldn&amp;#x27;t be implemented through Slack mentions, it should be through a defined incident management process with the appropriate policies and tools designed for that job.&lt;p&gt;- Remember that you have a diagnosed condition that can be considered a disability and that your employer must by law make reasonable accommodations for it if you live in the USA. You should insist on being provided a method of work that accommodates you (and you&amp;#x27;re not even asking for anything that costs money). If you get pushback on this Slack situation, insist in writing that this is a disability issue and you are formally requesting a disability accommodation and include HR on your request. (It&amp;#x27;s true that HR is there to protect the company and not you, and in this situation that&amp;#x27;s exactly what they&amp;#x27;ll do: protect the company from an ADA lawsuit by accommodating your disability)&lt;p&gt;To be quite honest I&amp;#x27;m not even sure your ADHD is actually the problem here. Your company sounds like a nightmare.</text></comment>