Is continuous partial attention the new normal?

One thing slack sucks at is any kind of “priority inbox”. It’s instead this game of hyper-vigilant whack a mole where you constantly have to decide what to respond to. Constantly making these decisions makes us less effective. This drains our focus and ability to work on what’s important.

Honestly it’s acceptable as a dev, unless you have an explicit expectation, to ignore most slack messages and respond to what’s important. What’s “important” is pretty contextual.

I only look at 5-6 channels relevant to my team and mute all others. I respond relatively quickly (within 1-2 hours) to teammates and team stakeholders unless it’s a true emergency. For randos that want help or to put work on my plate, I usually respond in a few days. I look at silly, social channels sporadically only when I’m just bored, feel like bonding with coworkers, or am too drained to think about work..

When conversations have complex subtleties, I ask to chat on a zoom or voice call so we can focus on the conversation instead of quick, easy to misinterpret text.

> have to be on top of threads in 50 different slack channels every day.

My team established early on that Slack is not intended for real-time discussions. Urgency means a phone call. Anything that needs documented for the future should be in a tool that is less ephemeral. Slack is for watercooler discussions, not actual collaboration... at least, for us.

So no - splitting your attention to Slack is not the new normal, and I'd be worried about a company that does expect such a thing.

My recommendation is to call it out to your team as a problem, and explicitly decide what communication mechanism serves which purpose, and what the expected response times are. FWIW, we decided to expect 2 hour response time to Slack discussions, one day responses to email, and to pick up the phone if someone calls as that implies something more urgent than 2 hours.

Start setting boundaries. Start with something small and I think you'll find it's quite addictive.

Another thing is to find out who your supervisor is and what their priorities are. Sync yours with his/hers. Some tech companies make it hard to do that, but you can always look at your paycheck and see who signs it.

Don't sweat it. Make sure your manager understands that your velocity is limited by colleagues treating asynchronous communication as synchronous. You'll either be keeping up with all these Slack channels, or you'll be coding. I personally need about 15 minutes to ramp up when starting to code, and about 15 minutes to bundle unfinished work into a state that's easy to come back to later.

Also, don't let teammates underestimate the amount of work it will take to accomplish a task. I feel like there have been a lot of under/unreported hours in previous jobs, so if you're realistic you'll feel less productive than colleagues.

You've trained your brain to be like this.

Try to spend at least 2 weeks without electronics(also TV) in some place remote. This should be enough to unwind your bad habits at least for a while. Since you're a developer you should be in place where you can afford this. If not it's time for a new gig, you deserve to have plenty of time for other activities. My point is you can't keep a car running with a broken engine.

Bonus tip: get redshift/f.lux on your machines and sleep with a sleep mask(don't cheap out). You'll be surprised.

I actually like slack because it means stuff is written down. It is async communication though. Meaning.. I'll get back to messages when I get back to them. I generally put aside some time to read them in bulk every day.

When working from home you really only have:

* Scheduled repeated calls (daily standups etc)

* Scheduled once off calls

* Ad hoc calls

* Emails

* Slack/Teams

In general if someone just calls me out of the blue I'll ignore it until they follow up with a reason to why they need to contact me. Unless they "outrank" me - then I will answer.

Maybe it’s the way my brain works. When I joined the company, I was invited to ~50 Slack channels, where hundreds of people post constantly.

Then I was told I could ignore them, so I muted or left them.

Days later, I realized I had completely missed out on product and coding discussions, so now I’m scared that I will miss important messages moving forward.

"Is continuous partial attention the new normal?"

Yes, and I hate it.

I'm expected to be a full stack dev in multiple stacks. Everytime they talk to me they want me to "focus" on something new while doing 10 other things. Today I just heard they want me to focus on becoming more of a DB2/COBOL resource...

> Any suggestion?

As a fellow ADHD software engineer:

1. Read the work of Berné Brown (or listen to audiobooks while walking in nature) and learn to do the deeply anxiety-inducing work of setting boundaries.

2. Be clear with your manager that you do not have the conditions necessary to create business value.

Remove all notifications. And turn slack off when you need to focus