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

I don’t have ADHD but I get very distracted by Slack. Here’s what worked for me.

1. Slack app uninstalled on my phone. If I need it for something, I install it, use it, then delete again.

2. Slack app on my laptop fully closed by default.

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.

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.

6. Tell your close team mates/manager that if they ever need you urgently they can contact via Signal/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.

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.

I tweak my Slack pretty heavily to suit my ADHD but 90% of it is: turn off (desktop) notifications entirely. Not "sometimes", all of it. (I just set Windows to DND so I still get Slack's red dot) I notice the red dot as soon as it appears anyway, but the lack of bigger visuals & audio means if I'm actually focused (and don't notice the red dot) I don't get yanked out of it.

The other 10% is:

* Mute unnecessary channels

* Turn off mentions entirely for channels where they don't mean much other than "@XYZ is looking at it"

* Set mobile notifications to "only if away" (+ a work hours schedule; if it's important they can click the "notify anyway" link)

* If you're on Android: change the notification sound to something custom that's a lot more "calm" and quieter, because you notice it anyway and it won't give off the "important! DM! check now!" feeling that all of Slack's do. (I miss this on iOS)

* On really bad days (focus-wise): don't be afraid to hide or close Slack entirely to just focus. I usually just put it away in Windows' extended notification tray, so I can occasionally check it without relaunching (or appearing offline/away).

I started using 4 virtual desktops to manage distractions many years ago and it’s worked wonderfully for me.

Desktop 1 is for chat, email, Spotify, and general web browsing.

Desktop 2 is for software development only, nowadays VSCode. A separate browser profile is used here and only for development related browsing (docs, stack overflow, live testing).

Desktop 3 is data and system administration. Remote terminals, Excel, database clients, and similar go here.

Desktop 4 is a catch-all. I use it for infrequent activity, like the occasional Photoshop, Word or vendor tooling.

I’ve used this same setup on Windows, OSX, and Linux for 15+ years. I always setup Alt-1,2,3,4 to switch and tweak the OS to remove all animations so it switches instantly.

I’ve found it much easier to stay in the zone this way.

I have ADHD diagnosed. I turned off all slack notifications. In fact, I almost always turn off all notifications. My mind is my domain and I choose when others can inject into it. The reason is, my job isn't some disaster related topic (well it is because it's climate change related but that disaster doesn't happen tomorrow). So that means, if poeple really need me, they can come find me, email me, send me a message on slack, or whatever. And i will reply to it when i get it. Nobody has ever seemed to have a problem with this and everyone seems to respect that I have limits on when I want to do things because I have my own things to do.

On a related note, I noticed that many of the things I had labeled as ADHD related went away after going to therapy and realizing why I do things to please others, over achieve and stay constantly involved and on top of everything, etc. It was very easy to label that as ADHD but in fact, the motivating factors that pushed me to reply to every email immediately, reply to every slack message, like, comment, subscribe everything was related to my personal schemas and modes. Not to discredit ADHD as a contributing factor, but I suddenly found like I had control over things when I began addressing these underlying internal beliefs.

I work mostly with Engineering teams, and consider slack inbound a pathology. Slack is great for collab in places, but it’s not a strong way to manage inbound, IMO.

The teams I’m responsible for make it easy for their stakeholder to raise issues, asks in a more deliberate, calmer way e.g. via GitHub issues or manager email. In exchange, we commit to mutually agreed response times on certain categories of business critical issues.

Generally, I don’t think it takes an ADHD diagnosis for slack inbound to completely kill your productivity, it’s a general problem. I don’t have ADHD but have strong empathy for how this must be a complete nightmare for you.

Perhaps have a manager put some structure on your inbound on your behalf?

Mute lots of channels by default. Might seem pointless to still keep them in the list, but I consider those like muted bookmarks. You have to mute @channel and @here before muting the channel for some unknown reason.

Turn off @channel and @here notifications for nearly everything other than your team-specific channel that should be only your immediate coworkers and your manager. There used to be an easy way to manage these settings across all your channels in one page, but I can't find it now.

If you have some kind of team alias that people are abusing then talk to your manager about that, and possibly just disable notifications for that. If you have a ticket system, people should be using it, not pinging you on slack all the time.

You should only get notifications for DMs and direct @notifications and @here only for your team channel. If you have a team channel for support people wanting support should post questions there without @here'ing or @person'ing questions. And you should be able to hide that and not answer questions for 30-60 minutes while you're off focusing on something else.

A lot of managing slack is just aggressively ignoring shit because you can't possibly have your finger on the pulse of literally every conversation in slack while getting your other work done. You have to rely on the fact that if it is truly important that you need to be involved in a conversation that you'll get dragged into that conversation later. If you're working somewhere that it doesn't work that way, and you find people bypassing you for things you should be involved in, then find another job.

Definitely keep slack off your phone or at least keep your work slack off your phone.

Not related to slack, but managing your ADHD symptoms.

Look into a low oxalate diet, it really helped me and my children.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21911305/

https://www.greatplainslaboratory.com/articles-1/2015/11/13/...

https://korunutrition.com/autism-low-oxalate-diet/

https://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/vegetarianism-and...

Step 1 - turn off all notifications, noise and badges. This will allow you to not be disturbed by interruptions.

Step 2 - if step 1 doesn’t work then shut slack down while working. Being reachable 100% of the time is insane. And the barrier for bugging is super low with Slack.

Step 3 - if 2,3 don’t work then use something like dispatch.do to prioritize all the junk and filter out all the noise.

Step 4 - it’s a you problem. Find a new job or seek professional help.

Ask your company to consider using Microsoft Teams instead. It's so repulsive that you and everyone else will probably be far less willing to communicate at all.

Only half-joking.

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.

I have ADHD and have found Slack to be a massive distraction. I haven't fully solved the issue, but explaining to your manager 'look, I can't always be available on Slack, I need to block time off in my calendar where I have Slack closed' - to any reasonable manager, that should be absolutely fine. Set your status to something like 'distraction free mode' and just close it for a few hours.

You might feel a sense of separation anxiety doing this initially, but you get used to it, especially when you realise you're almost never missing anything important by doing this. Start small perhaps, block off an hour a day for a week, then next week block off two hour periods. Eventually, try to block off certain mornings or afternoons. Try to keep the times you do this consistent so other folks in your team know/expect it. Just be honest about it and step away from it, if they're a decent place to work, they'll understand and encourage it. If they don't and expect you to be 100% available all the time, then they're both ridiculous and not a good place for folks who are neurodivergent, which is a bit of a red flag

Here's what I have found helps:

1. Mute any channel that you don't absolutely need to have active.

2. Use the slack-calendar integration if it's available for whatever calendar solution your team uses.

3. Add meetings in your calendar for yourself for doing work. Many people at my company will label these as "focus time", "Heads down on project work" or the like.

Depending on the slack integration, it will show that you are in a meeting. If not you can set your status to something like suggested above, and you can mute your notifications for the duration.

I'll often additionally let the people I work closest with know how they can get hold of me if something is truly urgent "Hey, I go super heads down on project work from 12-5 most days, if something super urgent comes up you can call me at ###-####".

> 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)

To be honest, this isn't an ADD thing. This is poor management. Don't think you're an outlier here, I'd be shocked if anyone was getting anything done.

First, uninstall work comms from your phone and from personal devices (unless explicitly mandatory of course).

Second, mute all channels except the ones you actually need notifications for. Mentions will still show bubbles and can still show notifications but messages that are irrelevant will not.

Put a permanent slack status that reads something like "Ping me if you need me, otherwise I probably won't see it!" with a :warning: emoji as the icon.

Finally, if you're still getting too many notifications, talk to your manager about the productivity and distractions problem. Do not make it about your ADD. It won't matter to them in the typical case, and doesn't actually signal to them it's a problem they can solve. Instead, speak about it in the context of a team distraction. I guarantee you with that many channels, you're definitely not the only one thinking this.

Just a tip about the muting: You can manage the channel categories in slack, putting most of the channels into their own category, and then muting the entire category by right clicking on the category title.

I have had adhd and autism. Thought it was a birth trait. But adulthood happened and i had been getting away more and more from those symptoms.

Now it’s coming back. And I realized it has a lot to do with parenting incorrectly.

Let’s just say looking back, there is nothing you can do to adjust to a moving train with adhd. So start reducing your role. Shrink a bit. Be less manager. and be more managed if that helps. And start communicating loudly about what makes slack difficult. Very loudly. People will realize who you are without realizing you have adhd. And will adjust to how you work.

So figure out how many things you can track at any one time. My max is five. So reduce your inputs to just those items. And designate one of them for colleagues.

I often close Slack when I need to focus on something. And I'll spend hours of the day with my phone on do-not-disturb

If you're needing to be urgently-reached multiple times a day, there's something seriously wrong at your company. Almost any message should be able to wait a few hours

You mention "tickets piling up", which sounds like it goes beyond Slack. If these are actual tasks piling up faster than you can complete them, that's a whole separate problem with the company and has nothing to do with you or your adhd

If the company does have systemic issues that are making it hard to function on the job, I'd suggest looking elsewhere. Or at least talking about it with your manager

This isn't your problem, it's the company's inefficient use of attention. Spamming and interrupting everyone with notifications and expecting everyone to read everything is a terrible model.

0. They need to rotate an "on-call" person who isn't necessarily expected to output work, but instead absorb and triage all the inbound requests.

1. It's rude to directly message someone on a team without a specific, recent context.

2. If an issue is serious enough, then the on-call person can pull in others.

Companies can diverge from this model at their own peril.

Make checking your messages part of your routine, as opposed to an interruption of said routine. More concretely, set certain time windows of your day, be it hourly or every 4 hours, where you check Slack and reply to relevant messages, after which you drop it again until the next window.

Turn off all Slack notifications (or close out of it all together) and set daily and repeating calendar events that say “check Slack” to pop up instead. That’s how I’ve setup all kinds of reoccurring but otherwise distracting tasks and it works great.

> They have 1000+ channels

What a time to be alive

First of all, talk to your manager. Ask for a trial that you will use Slack just 2-3x a day as you described and otherwise you want to be contacted via e-mail/Jira/etc. If there's something big and important but not urgent (like "production down we are bankrupt"), ask to forward it to you via e-mail.

> I'm simply drowning and my tickets are all piling up.

That's where your pace increases and you will show improvement thus you will be allowed to continue like that.

I don't have (diagnosed) ADHD, but this keeps me sane:

1. mute all @here or @channel notifications. Those are almost never critical. If somebody needs you to do something, they'll DM you.

2. pick a handful of channels that are important and mute all others (in that they don't show up as having unread messages). Those are the channels that you'll want to read all messages in.

3. Block 1-3 daily calendar entries with 15 minutes in them in your calendar for Slack time. This is the time where you will read the messages from 2. and respond. Feel free to extend the time blocks if you need to if it's up and you aren't done. You'll look at channels in 2. outside of these time blocks.

4. If there is something urgent going on (ie production outage), you'll deviate from this and that's fine.

Slack is ultimately destructive to deep work - it fragments your attention by definition.

The expectation to focus on complex tasks while holding multiple side conversations does not consider the limitations of the human condition.

The people who chatter all day most likely don’t engage in deep work.

Nothing wrong with you, the expectations are unrealistic.

Slack demands you to follow all the time or you lose the ability to participate in decisions. This is incredibly demanding and destructive.

"I'm thinking about closing Slack and opening it 2-3x a day."

You've found your own fix. There's nothing wrong with shutting down distractions. Just let people know about it.

My problem has been the open office environment. If I need to get stuff done I put on some headphones and focus on my job. Everyone knows that I'm working and leave me alone unless it's important.

Slack is great in small doses, but a complete time-waster beyond a certain threshold. I don't have ADHD, but I still have had problems with Slack. Don't feel bad about shutting all notifications off, or, better yet, closing the app entirely, and only opening it once or twice a day. You will almost instantly feel better. Some people may get annoyed that you're not instantly available, but if you're not able to get your work done then many more people will get annoyed. There is no perfect solution.

This may be less or more helpful depending on your role and company culture.

When you are junior, you better be responsive. The more senior you are, the more important it is for you to own and drive your own agenda, which can only be done by consciously ignoring a ton of noise (or even valuable signal, if it's not valuable to your agenda). I can imagine this is even more important with ADHD.

The way I run my work life is, I have a document of 10-15 key things that are on my radar to push, out of which 3-4 are on my "crush first" list.

These are really important, strategic, big things. I remind myself that if I get these done but nothing else it would be a huge win. On the other hand, of I get a lot done of random stuff but not these, it's a fail.

That gives me licence to tune out the noise that isn't relevant to my goals. And to politely decline meetings, etc. Don't get me wrong, if a senior leader wanted to talk about something that's not on my list, I won't decline that meeting - but I assume that because he or she is voting with their time, it's probably actually important.

What I am getting at here is that if you define a valuable agenda, you can operate in a more 'pull' than 'push' way - meet with people and follow channels that you know ahead of time are relevant to the 3 things you care about today, and give yourself licence to ignore the rest.

Your manager can be helpful here. Meet w him/her and say: these are the 15 things on my radar, of which these 3 are top priority. Is that right?

If your manager confirms (or corrects) your priorities, it gives you some licence to ignore other stuff too.

Slack has some pretty fine grained notification controls. You can set it up so only certain channels notify, or so that only direct mentions notify, or so that only dms notify.

You can also just turn off notifications altogether. Explain to your colleagues that slack is keeping you from getting work done so you are going to turn off notifications. If you feel guilty give them a way to contact you if they truly need you immediately.

Lots of advice here about things you can do, but remeber that your work is relational: you and your company can work together to find a solution that works for you. I see this as a JEDI (justice, equality/equity, diversity, and inclusion) issue. Your company should be willing to make reasonable adjustments to accommodate you.

Personal, biased, cynical, enterprise marinated opinions follow:

Turn off notifications. Don't have Slack visible all the time.

Stop working on multiple things at the same time (unless you really know what you're doing and can handle it; tip: you probably don't and can't).

Have an actual process behind your tickets. Tickets are never directly assigned to anyone by the reporters; on that route lies madness. Have someone triage the tickets and prioritize them. Lesser prio tickets will just have to wait, a human can offer a finite amount of work per time unit.

Slack is no substitute for actually having order in things. Slack is not a ticketing system or even a good system for assigning work, and it most definitely is not a project manager or a scrum master. It's just a chat system, treat it like that.

I for one cannot live with notifications enabled in anything. I turn everything off by default. All sounds, all blinking little shits and bubbles which pop up constantly -- there's NO NEED for anyone to suffer at the mercy of attention-begging engagement gadgets.

I check Slack and such when I have the mental bandwidth available to process whatever is in them, usually when I have some minutes (e.g. after kicking off flashing or a build, running a long grep). Then, I do a quick sweep to check things.

I use a form of Eisenhower matrix. Urgent/non-important: if you can delegate, do so; if not, "please file a ticket/comment on the ticket". Non-urgent/non-important: IGNORE. The important/non-urgent goes to the personal prio-2 TODO list to check later. The urgent/important: if I'm working on it, these become do-it-nows in a prio-1 TODO list. Otherwise they go to prio-2 TODO list to check later.

TODO lists are best in free form bullets/tickboxes, either electronically or on paper. I wouldn't use a phone app unless you really need the mobility.

It may not be helpful in your particular case depending on how your Slack is administered and similar, but my setup is like so:

- https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack with WeeChat (weechat.org) for IM only (i.e. configured so that it only notifies when an IM (one-on-one or group) is received); and

- https://github.com/tomhrr/paws for retrieving messages from Slack as email, and sending responses to those emails to Slack.

https://github.com/nicm/fdm is used for all filtering of email, including Slack messages. This allows for rules like e.g. marking everything from Slack as read, unless it's from channel X and matches your username, or it was sent after 6pm, or similar.

With this setup, IMs still come through as IMs, but everything else goes to email and is treated like email. Retrieving email and Slack messages happens based on local configuration, so it can e.g. be set up to fetch once per hour, and then all of those messages can be dealt with in one go. As the filters are refined, the number of useless messages that have to be reviewed decreases. With this configuration, at least in my experience, Slack is much less of a nuisance.

I'm really sorry. As someone else diagnosed with ADHD it's been very hard for me to be positive about anything. Hang in there, I guess... life just seems impossible.

I have regained a lot of focus by using the Unread filter. I don't think it's on by default, you have to go into settings. I use it to mark the events in my day where I go to slack. I just hit the unread filter, read through all that I need or want to, respond, and then decide if I'm going to be in slack for a while (e.g. A conversation that will be having a lot of back of forth) or if I can safely context switch back to whatever I was doing or something new. The Unread filter has keyboard shortcuts too, so you can navigate stuff quickly.

This may also be an opportunity to raise the issue. If it's not your style to be direct about it, consider just asking in your team channel for advice on this very issue. Maybe it's an important conversation to open up at your workplace.

Consider medication if you haven't already. You don't have to take amphetamines, there are drugs like guanfacine that isn't a stimulant at all, and bupropion that is a weak stimulant used for depression that also works for ADD/ADHD. Bupropion helped me a lot with concentration.

If you have ADHD and can't concentrate when people are trying to contact you all the time, you should be that person who is unreachable.

That doesn't mean you can't set expectations to help people figure out how to contact you, or give escalation paths if somebody does need you immediately

> company that uses Slack heavily. They have 1000+ channels and my team is tagged in a lot of stuff

It's possible that the entire company has problems here -- with communication/organizing efficiency, and with lots of activity that might not be very productive (spending lots of time operating Slack, and being interrupted by it).

You might not be able to solve the entire-company problem. But you should talk with your manager, if you trust them. They could interface sideways and up the chain of command, and with HR -- on behalf of their reports' health and the effectiveness of their unit, and maybe more broadly (depending how hierarchical the company is).

Not everything is important. Not all mentions, threads, conversations, channels are important.

Prioritize the most important ones.

Using Slack subsections I prioritize like so:

  1. P0 - Stakeholders and Peers
    Includes my manager, and peers I work with regularly
    Includes announcement groups
    Includes leadership groups
  2. P0 - Adhoc Conversations
    Anything with a P0 individual
  3. P1 - Reports
    All of my direct reports
  4. P0 - Incidents
    Anything that needs my attention
    Alerts, monitors, etc
  5. P0 Engineering
  6. Almost everything else
  7. Guilds and Social

Hope it helps.

If something is important enough, it will reach you.

It sounds Slack is being used wrong. You should not be in that many channels.

If there are tickets assigned to you and those tickets have Slack channels, you should be in those channels. You shouldn't be in other ticket channels.

Your entire team shouldn't be pulled into large numbers of channels.

Feel free to ignore channel messages for anything that isn't your area or assigned task, unless someone mentions you with @ directly. Respond only to DMs, and messages related to tasks you are working on. Don't even look at anything else unless you have spare cycles, other than maybe some general channel that is for your team only.

Yes, do exactly what you think you need to do. I've been staving off this from happening by making it very clear to my boss why my tickets are piling up, and why expecting me to check in on multiple threads for the possibility of me being needed on them is an incorrect expectation. I make it as clear as I can to people, that if they need my attention on something, tag me in a Jira comment or DM me. Communication is a part of my duties, but it should never require all of my energy.

Now, of course, since my manager has shifted from being an engineer to climbing a management ladder, my needs make zero sense to him, and he thinks that since he can monitor 100s of channels concurrently and attend meetings literally all day every day, surely I should be able to do whatever his pet issue is that day. He also feels like checking in on the status of a ticket every fucking day is going to help me do it faster, but it's the way it is, the systems companies thoughtlessly adopt push us out. Ultimately, this is going to push and pull until I'll probably be underwater too long and either get fired or quit. So my advice is to figure out if you have any possibility of staying, and do what you feel you need to in protecting your sanity, until you leave.

Do not try and fulfill this expectation. It's dumb and you're the wrong person for it. If it gets to a certain point, make it clear that they should hire someone else who's specifically good at that, if that's what they define the job to be.

ADHD-pro-advice: Use your OS settings to suppress red „unread“-badges! Don‘t let them shove the pile of distraction into your face at all times. Instead, create reminders to actively _pull_ communication. Adjust the number of those reminders and the time blocked after each so that you can cope with the amount of communication coming in - but do that on your terms and schedule, not on theirs.

In technical terms: you’re not the PubSub-server, you’re a client polling for messages when your resources allow for it.

Not ADHD, but this is how I deal with Slack:

- Disable all sounds and vibrations of Slack on my phone (but keep the notifications)

- Disable notifications on my phone outside the work hours

- Mute all channels that I am strictly not interested in

- Disable all desktop notifications

- I don't have dual screen. Before I was a screen dedicated to slack, and it was actually an unnecessary distraction

With that, I only look at Slack whenever I'm not focused at something. If I find that a channel contains too much spam, I also mute it. If it's important, people will have to ping me.

You probably seen this advice before but just in case, here is what worked for me (and should work for anyone, even without ADHD)

1. block time in your calendar, and let your peers and managers know that you are "blocking time to do your actual job"

2. there are slack plugins that auto set you as away / turn off notifications when you have an outlook / calendar meeting

3. use a pomodoro timer

4. focusatwill powertools with noise canceling headphones

5. important - lot's of the distraction is due to FOMO, a simple question that someone asks to get unblocked becomes a forced "meeting without a meeting" where people feel like if they don't respond then their voice will not be heard. This needs talking to the team and coming up with some ground rules to avoid it. You want people to use slack to get unblocked, you don't want people to force others into a FOMO based hour long thread.

6. Agree not to use slack as a ticketing system / documentation system. If someone reports a bug on slack, great, now it's the reporter's responsibility to put it in GitHub Issues / Linear / JIRA etc. Slack is terrible as a ticketing system. If you need something to get done, open a ticket.

7. Your last sentence makes a lot of sense, opening it 2-3x times a day is a great idea.

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...

Frankly, how does anybody get any work done in such a setup?

Long gone seem to be the days when Joel Spolsky was arguing for uninterrupted work as a key factor to getting things done [1]. It's even one of the 12 points on his test.

https://www.geekwire.com/2016/just-shut-let-devs-concentrate...

I'm not diagnosed with ADHD, but Slack's notification noises trigger a visceral fight-or-flight response in me. Not PTSD surely, but in that spectrum.

This was from an early stage startup experience with 10 hour timezone deltas, and never-not being on call for some crucial infrastructure.

The sounds still evoke the dread,annoyance, and simmering resentment that accompanied a 4AM slack ping with the CTO just saying "Hey"

I got diagnosed a year ago.

Best resources I've found: https://adhdjesse.com/newsletter (this taught me about rejection sensitive dysphoria, ouch) and https://www.adhddd.com/anti-planner/

Same diagnosis and exp here. Welcome to notification hell. Problem is all of these bs communication apps are treated as synchronous instead of asynchronous and managers think it helps when in reality it causes distractions, extra stress and loss of productivity.

1000 slack channels. Lol wtf.

Here’s what i do and it’s helped. I turned them ALL off. Banners, badges, bells. All of it. I check on my terms.

I guess there are at least two types of communication going on on all those slack channels: 1. communication that is relevant for your current task 2. communication that is not relevant for your current task, and which might or might not be relevant to you at all.

You could try to limit your exposure to the second kind of communication to certain fixed time slots, e.g. 20min when starting work and 20min before taking off. If it’s not possible to limit exposure within your account by setting up favourite channels and muting others (not a slack user here), you could ask IT for a second slack account that participates only in the first type of communication.

Setting up completely slack-free intervals could be another way to increase focus on the relevant tasks. Start small - it’s crazy what you can achieve in 30min of uninterrupted work and you’d be surprised: probably will no one notice that it now takes you 15min on average to answer instead of 5min.

I don't have ADHD, at least I don't think I do, but I find Slack and other asynchronous communications unworkable. If there's no other choice, I suppose you should follow some of the other's advice and simply block out a time mid-morning and mid-afternoon when you spend 30 minutes or less checking the threads and then closing it again.

It's not you. Slack is simply wrong for this; people just don't know it yet.

The most efficient way for a programming team to communicate is via an issue-tracking system (Jira, etc.). Open an issue per bug/feature, and all communication related to it is reflected there.

In addition to asynchronous interrupts, Slack encourages people to respond too fast, without thinking. There's also a lot of "NONB" communications on it, which leads to political rants, insults, hurt feelings, and discontent. Companies should just stop it. Everything isn't a video game.

I have a routine that I have kept for the last few years after going through similar (and working through it with my therapist). It's very routine based which works for me.

I start my morning with going through any assigned GitHub pull requests plus any new Jira or Confluence notifications. It can take anywhere from a few minutes to an hour or two, but once it's done I don't look at those again until the next morning.

I check Slack after and clear out any unread messages, taking care of any actionable ones that need a reply right there. I leave Slack mostly on until the morning standup since I am a morning person.

After standup, I mark myself as away and then check it a little after lunch and once more before I am done for the day.

I have never had anyone complain about me being unavailable with this setup. If there's a 'true' emergency they can nudge me on iMessage but that's happened once in 3 years.

Good luck figuring this out.

Not an advice for OP but Slack’s focus on user engagement is why we chose Zulip. Initially we tried Microsoft Team on a premise that this kind of software should suck enough to justify using it only for important stuff, but Teams is way beyond just “software that sucks”.

Zulip is manageable and feels like work without turning into some non-stop UX circus.

I don’t know if it’s enough, but the first thing I do when joining a new organization is aggressively cut down on notifications, both using the N app, preferences, and the operating system preferences. The next thing I do is set expectations with coworkers, the same tool can be used very differently across different organizations.

1000+ channels sounds insane. Maybe it's normal to use Slack like that in larger enterprises, but IMO at that kind of scale they need to have separate Slack workspaces for each team, and then higher level ones (or a different method of communication) for higher-level strategic & executive planning. Even if you're not expected to be in the vast majority of them, having 1000+ Slack channels all under one workspace would be overwhelming for a lot of people, I'd think.

For the OP trying to manage that situation, I'd say leave or mute any channel you don't need to be in, set it to only notify you for @ mentions. (@channel mentions would depend whether it's abused; if not, those could be included too. If it is, then probably best not to notify on those.) And then yeah, as you suggested, aside from people specifically tagging or DMing you, only look a couple times a day, at specific times.

If you think that could cause inconvenience for others, or if even just the @mentions are too much, it could be worth bringing it up with your manager too. (If you've got a good manager, probably worth bringing it up regardless.) Try to approach it not as a complaint, nor as something you can't handle, but just a challenge to be solved, like any of the many engineering challenges you work through every day. Along the lines of, "Hey, I was wondering if I could run something by you. I've noticed that with all the Slack channels we're in, I'm getting pinged pretty regularly. I want to make sure I'm available when people need me, but I also find it helpful if I can have uninterrupted stretches to concentrate on coding. Was thinking a decent solution might be ______. What do you think?" Of course you know your manager better than I do, so obviously tailor it to how you'd normally communicate with them. Personally though, I always appreciate it when someone on my team comes to me with an issue in that way, as an opportunity for improvement. They might even have some useful ideas, or be able to help facilitate.

Turning off all notifications except for direct-to-you seems reasonable, unless you're being paid to be on-call or something and it's truly critical that you be responsive to the team notifications? Batch checking it every few hours at a specific time. I've started doing this with slack/discord/etc. anyway, although I'm still responsive to signal -- and I wish there were a better protocol for "signal by default doesn't notify, but trusted contacts can choose to notify if they want".

(My first thought: Oh wow, I would be tempted to try to get an ADHD diagnosis if it got me legally immune from Slack (and Teams, ideally), and forced everyone to use Signal, IRC, or some other less disgusting systems when interacting with me.)

Try methylphenidate or similar long lasting adhd meds, instead of rittalin, and avoid strattera its largely useless. also get a private phone separate from your work phone, and leave the work phone at work, with notifications off in general.

> I don't want to be the person that's not reachable

^ you have to

unscheduled communication isn't something your brain can recover from

check in one time per day. only read your inbound @username. do not browse or scroll

otherwise if someone wants to talk to you, let them schedule it a day in advance

To deal with my ADHD, I set almost all notifications off. For messaging, checking a few times a day may be sufficient, depending on your situation. The old Dr. Pepper bottles had 10-2-4 on them. That might be good times to check, if you work a standard schedule. To keep myself focused, I use a Pomodoro timer and work in 25 minute segments with 5 minute breaks between most and a longer one every so often (15 minute), if I am left alone and undisturbed for that long. To avoid being disturbed, I regularly block out calendar time in the mornings when my energy is better for Cal Newport style Deep Work. Hope this helps — best wishes!

ADHD diagnosed, continuously self employed since a teenager. Nobody at work would even guess this condition rules every thought and action of my life.

My advice is simple; extend unbounded empathy to everyone and it'll come back. Be open and honest about what you need (though you don't need to specify why).

Find an environment that fosters everyone, neurodiverse or otherwise, to be the complex humans they are while protecting their right to privacy.

The tools are usually not the problem, but their use often points to a cultural issue.

Focus on knowing yourself and the culture you need to thrive. Then find it, build it, champion it, advocate for it, explain it and respect with empathy resistance to it.

People will thank you.

Something I do that might also work for some folks: I don't use the Slack installed app, just the webapp on my browser. It makes it easier to hide away/close it.

The main reason I do this is that as a freelance dev I work with several different companies; I keep a separate browser profile for each, and Company X's Slack just lives as a tab in the corresponding browser profile/instance. I've also found it helps me keeps Slack as something I check for time to time, instead of an active, distracting presence on my computer.

Star channels and people with occasional activity that are important for your day-to-day work (not necessarily all the "team" ones). Create a section at the very top above Starred with the places and people that you need to talk to daily. Customize your alert/sound settings, and right click channels to change each of their notifications and mute status. Better yet, leave the ones that don't matter. Ignore the lower channels when they become bold and look at them once a week when you have the time. If something critical in an unusual spot happens people will DM you so don't worry.

I have ADD. Diagnosed medicated 30 years ago as a child. Slack distraction isn't my specific achilles heel, but I think I get it.

What works for me is breaking up workdays into 3-4 parts. I physically move, rearrange my desk, restart my laptop, take breaks, close files and such to punctuate day parts and keep them distinct. I need a lot more than a timer to make this work.

Once I have the day split into distinct parts, I can deal with 2hr blocks at a time, rather than a whole workday. Whatever your specific difficulties are, I find they're more tractable within a 2hr block. Maybe you allocate 30m to slack and then close it.

I tend to "lay out my tools." Open only the files and apps that I need for the current block, print out my notes, stuff like that. Imagine laying out tools and parts before starting to assemble a piece of IKEA furniture. Then you put that stuff away, grab some other stuff, and start to work on fixing the sink.

The details are emergent. At least for me, this method is useful in the abstract. Whether the issue is slack, procrastination, big getting in the way of small or the reverse... I seem to find solutions much more readily within these smaller blocks of time.

I don't know if what works for me will work for you, but if it does... the way it works is that solutions to problems like your slack problem are easier to find when you just need to solve them for the next couple of hours.

I find I spend a lot of mental effort trying for big solutions to big problems, and besides medication, very few big solutions stick. Small solutions otoh.. seem to emerge once the framing is correct.

Also, not everyone is cut out for highly collaborative work. I'm not. I need decent size blocks of work that I can take and own. I'm just not reliable enough to have others depend on my work on a "by lunchtime" schedule. That doesn't mean I can't collaborate. I have managed teams and worked in people roles. I just can't work and have a conversation simultaneously. Instead, I will allocate a whole 2 hr block of time to pair programming-like modes.

If your solutions are good and you have confidence in them, workplaces tend to be flexible enough to contain them.

I don't have ADHD and 1000+ channels is a lot. I feel the same way at 10 channels.

As an engineer I would make the tickets only exist in the ticket tracking system that's not on slack. Communicate over there.

I don't know about other roles.

I made a very unsuccessful show HN for localslackirc: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33799463

It has a feature to simply ignore "@here" and "@everyone" coming from certain people or certain channels.

It lets you completely leave channels client side, without slack knowing about it.

IRC client lets you /ignore people

No animated GIF and reactions

A good IRC client lets you configure your notifications. If they make a sound or just blink the icon.

Personally I find using slack with it a lot more achievable than using the regular client.

At a previous company I had a very similar problem, and eventually converted an old SIM-less phone into my Slack device and mounted it in a stand on my desk. (Slack was not deemed a sensitive company app that had to run on company devices, which considering the access to customer channels and prod-affecting chatops features seemed stupid, but I'm not IT.)

I could physically turn Slack off by turning the phone off, and the only other way to get through to me was async, via email or in tickets.

A coworker I trusted had my personal cell number and texted me when something was actually urgent, which happened twice in 6 months.

You do want to be that person that is not reachable. There is no value in being available 24/7 unless your job is oncall and responsible for addressing fires in real-time.

Shut off slack, sign-off and coach people on how to reach you. They should rely on batch systems that you check a couple times a day or they can call or however else contact you in an emergency that requires real-time engagement.

You can also do office hours, where you are reliably online and chatting at known and published time.

Slack is cool because it makes everyone feel important in exchange for them giving up their time and productivity.

People here will share all sorts of productivity hacks, but your workplace is legally required to make reasonable concessions to accommodate disabilities. Talk to your manager and/or HR and figure something out.

A few years ago I joined an employer that doesn't have chat at all (a university, schools and government seem to be where you're most likely to find this) and after a few months I marveled over why I was getting so much done without working overtime and why I wasn't so exhausted when I got home.

I am healthier in every way (the visible change literally makes people's jaw drop), I have energy for a social life and side projects, and my work is higher quality than ever. I'm making a lot less than I could elsewhere but right now it's worth it.

Hi, I’m sorry you are feeling overwhelmed. My advice:

* Slack goes to the separate small monitor, not the big “work” monitor. Expense one up if you don’t have one.

* Sure thing, close Slack up from time to time. It might help to assign yourself some “office hours” (look at slack after lunch)

* Slack strength (its immediacy) is also its weakness (low permanency). Anything older than a week is forgotten. So- rejoice! Your backlog has just reduced to the last week, tops.

* You can mute with granularity: channels, people and threads. Mute away. Remove yourself from the “team” mentions. Remove yourself from “@here” mentions.

Setup focus time "meetings" on your calendar where you schedule time to be off slack - people can call you during them if they have to - and close out slack entirely when you're in those blocks.

I live and die by IRC and have often said "irssi is my panopticon."

I've customised the hell out of how it highlights (between channels and queries I have over 1,000 open at any given time), but it doesn't get to send me notifications or make any noise, I tab across to it every so often and read and clear the notifications then.

I use bitlbee to gateway to most non-IRC services plus a paid irccloud acccount to connect to Slack.

I'm not sure any of this is going to help but it works for me so I'm sharing on that basis.

I think your idea of limiting Slack is great. You can provide an alternative to be reachable for emergencies if needed.

In addition in my reading, I've come across some helpful nutritional approaches and these were news to me:

http://doctoryourself.com/hoffer_ABC.html http://doctoryourself.com/adhd.html

(These articles are geared towards parents with ADHD kids, but applies to adults also.)

Changing notifications settings can get you pretty far. Also worth spending time chatting with your manager or peers to understand exactly what the expectations are for response time. It may be that you have a lot more leeway than you're giving yourself.

Here's how I configure my notifications, FWIW: https://scribehow.com/shared/How_to_Manage_Your_Slack_Notifi...

Please ignore if you're already doing this and/or know this stuff.

I strongly advice behavioral therapy. Not any therapy, this is crucial. Find yourself a therapist that focuses and is an expert on behavioral therapy and work with him to build up the tools you need to survive in this work environment with your condition.

They can help you build healthy habits, drop destructive behaviors and give you several tools to organize and monitor yourself. Basically, build up your brain muscle with the skills it naturally lacks due to your condition.

I have personally introduced "timed checkins" for my company. I'll reload slack once every 2, 3 hours and then answer everything, then go back to my regularly scheduled task.

Push for changes within your organization to make Slack more functional. Maybe the kinds of requests that happen in Slack need to happen from a webform that automagically creates tickets that get triaged. Maybe Slackbots can help automate some things that are requiring manual responses. I bet you're not the only one struggling with this. ADHD is like the early warning system for dysfunctional environments.

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?

I work with a person who has ADHD and is also a fantastic colleague. After we first met the team structure changed in such a way that they were less confronted with most everybody in the department and more working in a more isolated environment. This person has flourished since, possibly as a result of this change.

I don't know what size company you work in, but based on the super scientific sample size of 1, asking for a transfer to a more isolated team may help.

As a rule, I don’t use Slack for productive work, nor for productive relationships. The noise is high. The interface is poor. The incentive is to not get anything done.

Backing my own experience up, I don’t have a single high-performance friend/collaborator that is invested in the Slack experience. However, I am familiar with well-paid and tuned out managers who love Slack.

Your idea of separation (checking 2-3x per day) is the appealing solution in this case.

I use Freedom on Ios and SelfControl on MacOS to limit myself to 30 minutes of slack per day. Using those apps it is literally inaccessible outside of a predetermined window (turning them off outside of the window requires a lot of work, or just wiping the device). I have it set up so that any important announcements go to my email, which I can see and reply to if they are in predetermined channels.

I was in the same situation, I tried EVERYTHING, including supplements (mucuna pruriens help a bit), no slack (affects my work), full screen emacs only (same) and a long etcetera.

In addition to everything that was said... (no notifications, etc). The solution for me? : Medication. After trying not to be medicated for few years I talked to a psychiatrist and got a prescription for concerta.

Let's say I wish I did that 20 years ago.

Assuming that you got some nootropics working for you...

1. Virtual Desktop workspaces 2. Good set of noise canceling headphones(no, not listening all the time just as important to drown out noise) 3. Turn off notifications everywhere, yes even email. 4. Investigate and find good fidget music, mine tends to be music scores and classical music.

Oh, yeah, welcome to the ADHD club. The secret handshake is we do not give a flying fuck.

There's already lots of good advice for you personally.

This advice isn't necessarily for you but for anyone who can set slack policies to help manage the volume.

Channels w/ >7 people or 1 team:

- No @here.

- New ideas start are threads only. Just like email, give a Subject that's meaningful but not the full picture. All discussion related to that subject stay in the thread.

More advance teams:

- Use emojis to help signify topics at a glance. ?, !, at the leftmost position.

I don't have ADHD and I hate this too. I vastly prefer mail, not only because people put more effort in formulating their questions, but also because asynchronous communication is more accepted here.

Such tools can be quite a lot of distraction... I often ignore queries I think have lesser importance. If it really was important, they will probably contact me again.

I have given up on my ambitions to have a "clean desk"...

Our manager was recently talking about the importance of everyone being together in the office, for maximum real-time collaboration.

He would be delighted to hear about OPs Slack situation. "Look at all the collaboration!"

Anyway, similar in-person problems can also make it hard to focus. Even if you are not part of a conversation, you hear it nearby and tune in. (Yes, headphones can help.)

At least Slack is easier to mute.

You can’t be on slack 100% of the day. Just time box when you’re available on slack. Put it on your calendar so others know. Simple solution.

Turn off all notifications. Insist that your team create a single channel to triage all requests to them, make sure no engineers are in there just your PO (or a nominated person each day/week or whatever). Have everyone read Team Topologies and its follow up about remote work. Try to help everyone in the company understand that cognitive overhead is the mind killer.

I have the opposite problem. I concentrate so much that I forget to read my e-mails and other notifications, and people get angry with me.

1/ I read slack and email once a day. Sometimes once every two days. Sometimes I miss slack messages. If it is urgent, people reach out to me.

2/ I only look at slack messages sent to me as direct messages. Also I scan mentions and threads where I have participated.

3/ At a meta-level I have learned that giving up the attachment to looking good is the biggest boost to looking good.

Have you considered that you might just have a Slack problem? honestly.

Labels can be dangerous and polarising - individual psychology and behaviour fall on a nuanced multidimensional spectrum, and I think these labels target such a large range and severity of behaviour that they have a high risk of conflating symptoms with completely different causes. Combined with misaligned intensives to sell drugs, I'm highly sceptical of the majority of diagnoses.

I was diagnosed with dyslexia at a young age, but it turns out I was just a stubborn child who disliked accepting the seeming illogic of the written English language where other kids are usually less questioning and do what they are told, compared to truly? or "more" dyslexic people who genuinely struggle with placing letters in the correct order rather than merely bothering to remember them. This is the danger of diagnosing what is supposed to be a neurological disorder through relatively subtle behavioural symptoms.

It's completely possible to exhibit "ADHD" symptoms from an unhealthy work life... WFH and covid has caused instant messaging like Slack to take centre stage in all communication, and that has definitely messed with a lot of people's ability to focus on their work, myself included. I've had to take some quite extreme measures, making sure it's completely closed between certain times (not in away mode, but actually not loaded, unreachable). If there is an emergency, people have your phone number, sometimes you need time to yourself and that's when people can wait, unless it's an emergency.

> They have 1000+ channels and my team is tagged in a lot of stuff so I get a lot of notifications.

You don't have to have ADHD to struggle with something as intense as this. We also have the same problem. I have probably 250+ channels in my sidebar.

I treat it like email. Muted everything. Read things sporadically. Mostly Cmd-Shift-Escape to mark everything is read.

Fellow ADHDer and corporate VP here. Making an assumption you’re US-based. If you feel comfortable with your boss and HR, consider requesting an accommodation. ADHD is protected under the Americans with Disabilities Act. I’ve gotten accommodations several times in my career and it’s generally a non-controversial process at most companies.

Slack is an asynchronous communications system. Disable notifications and only look at it when want, like you do for email. You won't be that person that is not reachable as you will be, but on your terms and not theirs. The main thing is to try to be consistent and communicate your process so that people can gauge their expectations.

You should be that person who is not reachable. You need to set boundaries. Otherwise you are going to fall in the classic catch-22 of talking about the work and getting none of that work done. That's fine if you see your job as a paycheck. It's not so fine if you actually find meaning in your work and want to make forward progress.

To think that the decades of email suffering finally ended with... slack. Now I look back at those email driven times with relative fondness. Slack is being used to drive multiple, concurrent SYNCHRONOUS discussions. Left unchecked, none of us will survive in-tact !

I will admit to loving it sometimes (being jacked in) but it always leads to burnout.

>1000+ channels and my team is tagged in a lot of stuff so I get a lot of notifications.

As someone with ADHD, I really love Slack despite the pestering with notifications (I used to switch off notifications). We used it my previous organization. However, I really came to appreciate it as in my current org, we use Google Chat .

> 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.

Looks like you already know the way forward, tell your team that you will be checking slack regularly but on your own schedule. If they protest, tell them to grab a copy of Deep Work by Cal Newport.

As a dev internal communication should not be a primary goal. Especially in a large company you should have a team representative (e.g. engineering or product manager) that takes on this overhead. And others should be mindful of this. My company instructs people not to tag entire teams.

This is not on you!

I agree slack is awful. People run discovery and project management through slack and it is insane.

I’ve been trying to think of slack applications and associated software to tame that beast.

So Close slack man. That sounds like a workable solution. But first!!

You have a diagnosed disability talk to HR or your boss for an accommodation. You get formal legal protections in the USA when you disclose.

A lot of folks are hesitant to do this for good reasons. But If you are at a large company you are probably not the only one though. And if they decide to fire you for any reason they have to think twice or three times.

But you are probably a great worker etc… your disability is a creative asset and a super power when you can concentrate, so come up with a plan. Talk to your doctor or therapist about what accommodations would be reasonable. Maybe even talk with a disability/employment lawyer to understand what is reasonable. Not too sue but to understand what your rights are. This counts as doing your homework for any future issues.

Your company depending their sophistication should work with you.

People using slack in this way makes it sound like the entire company has ADHD.

Cal Newport's work may help. Check out "A World without Email". https://www.calnewport.com/books/a-world-without-email/

Try opening it in a web browser tab (you don't actually need to install the electron app).

Next, deny the notification permission when prompted by the browser, disable phone app notifications, etc.

Finally, if necessary, set your slack status to "If this is urgent, text me at 123-456-7890"

If you live in the U.S., you might look into asking for an accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

I don't know whether or not it's always a smart move, but my understanding is that it reduces the risk that your employer will give you an unreasonably hard time.

Ask for a reasonable accommodation for your disability that doesn’t require you to be on slack.

Are you located in the United States? If so, consider requesting an accommodation under the ADA.

Muting channels is my trick. Then look at mentions. And poll it and don't worry about seeming unavailable - set expectations and reliably respond on a daily basis instead of moment to moment.

Slack sometimes feels like a party app than internal messaging tbh. Always feels in a community and in the moment, than picking up tasks and handling it. Maybe that’s what productivity means but just sometimes feels wrong.

Perhaps keep your physical sensations in your mind, work on your awareness.

It's possible that your body got addicted to the dopamine rush of checking messages. Which is more immediately rewarding than putting in work.

Is Slack really the problem? To me it appears that you need to agree on a more structured process on how to manage workload and communication, i.e. a ticketing system with clear expectations upfront.

> 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.

This is fine.

Quality answers every couple of hours are better appreciated then nonsense rapid spam.

I think the most logical solution is to plan your own daily calendar for this. If you are not working in a position like support, you can stay away from slack completely and only check it during break times.

I was at the same situation, as many suggested I have unenrolled from many chats, but still I am not satisfied. Thus I decided to create an app, if you are interested DM’me, I’d like to know your feedback

Check it a couple times per day.

Don't check it in the morning. First check after lunch.

You are hardly the first person to complain that slack is a distraction. You could bring it up with your manager (no need to mention ADHD), as a team-wide fix is likely to be the most effective.

It's good! 2 times is good, 4 times is max. One as you arrive (put yourself as busy), one mid morning, one after lunch, one in the afternoon. A two to four hours delay is completely acceptable.

I’m wondering if replicating synchronous communication more closely could help. For example making it not possible to send you a message when you are “in conversation” with another user.

- Turn your sound off - Change how you get notified - Set your editor to fullscreen - give it its own virtual desktop - Learn the keybindings to be able to switch back and forth very quickly

Mute all but the critical channels, turn off notifications for the app, only check in predetermined times slots like every half hour. Adjust if you get pushback for not being available

Start taking your medication, you going to feel less annoying and expensive multi-tasking.

Also, I'm trying an App "Sensa" which promises help the executive dysfunction cause by the ADHD.

Catch up on stuff at some point in the day that works for you and close Slack the rest of the day, like you said. Minimize the number of times per day as much as possible.

Also talk to a professional.

Get a formal diagnosis. Get accommodations. Don’t just drop off slack without protection for when someone inevitably complains that you didn’t say “how high” when they said jump.

My previous company had many slack channels and they would always tag @here or @all

I simply ignored slack. Too much noise to be useful.

I had two or three channels that I would regularly check, and that's it.

“ I don't want to be that person that's not reachable”

You’re always reachable via email, just don’t open slack ever unless you want to ask someone else a question who prefers slack.

This is not a difficult problem. I block off time on my calendar for “Deep Work” from 2-3 hours at a time, change my status to “Doing Deep Work” and quit slack and Outlook.

I mute certain channels and set keywords that enable notifications: my name or MR code review requests. It is a small trick to add to your approach, maybe it helps.

Founder with ADHD here! I ran into this issue a bunch at my previous job as well. The notifications were always going off and detracting me from doing the actual work. There were two things I did, and do now, that have worked for me:

1. Similar to you, I muted my notifications and opened slack a few times a day.

2. I paired up with someone else to focus on the task at hand (like with Double[0]). I was able to ignore the pings, if they came through, because I felt more accountable to the person I was on the line with than the pings.

Your mileage may vary on these, so I would definitely encourage a bit of experimentation!

[0] https://doubleapp.xyz

It sounds like your employer's organization has ADHD, not you.

Go work somewhere else, you're describing a shit show, and you're in no position to fix it.

> closing Slack and opening it 2-3x a day

This is what I do and I don’t have adhd or anything like that. It’s necessary to get things done in this modern age

Stop eating carbs alltogether. Try carnivore diet for a few weeks and introduce some veggies, buts, berries, cheese after that.

ADHD was non existent 30 years ago. Now suddenly everyone and their kids get diagnosed for it. What has changed is a complete sedentary lifestyle and a ridiculous overdose on carbs.

Do not believe your docs for one second that there is something inherently broken with you that definitely requires medication. Your body and brain are fine. You must tweak your diet.

I set up windows when I check slack with my team and use mac's focus features to disable it's notifications outside the windows.

Consider moving to a smaller company. You're going to get a lot of interruptions even with the right tools at any large company.

Turn off notifications, check slack a few times a day.

Also figure out what your performance metrics are, responding to slack, or finishing tickets.

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

Do not enable channel notifications. Only direct messages and perhaps for some specific channels that you care about.

Try spending sessions on Slack, such as every hour you will spend 40 minutes on Slack, but split into 13-15 minutes each.

The function of notification is to distract you, so just disable them and check slack once in 15/20 minutes.

The problem isn’t you it’s them.

we dont use slack. just github, twitter, and rarely email. pd.pub. #buildInPublic #buildPublicDomain

Fuck slack. Treat it like email.

Batch it on an a regular schedule. Set boundaries publicly with its use.

Try looking for fully remote asynchronous companies. Comes with a different set of challenges for someone with ADHD, but companies with a culture that is more focused on asynchronous communication tend to work better with the high/low levels of focus that come with ADHD. I think if you're regularly getting pinged by people beyond your direct team, it's a sign of mismanaged culture.

having the same problem, also Slack/Teams UI is (visually) way too bloated. Using something cleaner like iMessage and IRC is helping me a lot, but this is unfortunately not possible all the time so i open up Teams only twice a day and pepole should call me if there is a urgent case.

tl:dr; turn off the notifications and proritise your workload so you know that the stuff you are clearing is the important stuff first, tell the company you are doing this to focus on your backlog.

This is going to come across as arrogant, and in a way it is, but in a healthy way.

If your tickets are piling up then you /need/ to ignore distractions. Someone then tries to track you down so you lead with 'is it on fire?' and when it is, ok that does rank highly, but when it's not 'sorry, I've got so much backlog I need to focus on right now, email me and I'll look at it as soon as I can, but fair warning, it might take a while' is not only ok, it's absolutely critical. In a very strange turn of events you'll likely see that somehow these critical problems are being solved at the source.... ;)

This also means that the workload you have and therefore the time you allocate to spending doing it has to be priority driven. Start with the flames and work back to the embers.

Finally, just to reinforce the main point here, if the tooling you've been provided with isn't enabling you to do your job well, then find how it will and tell the company what you plan to do to ensure productivity.

:) remember, they hired you to make them money, if you find a better way of making money faster and for longer only an idiot will find fault with that. This is how good ways of working evolve in environments.

Slack simply shows that the human mind is not made by default for looking a dozens of chat channels.

What helps me is checking slack only during my pomodoro breaks.

I also have my notifications disabled.

Almost everything can wait 20m.

Genuinely, have you considered leaving? You don’t have to work in a place that makes you so unhappy.

Set your slack notifications to email then you have async control to follow up in between work.

Just close it when you don't need it. It's not a problem until someone complains.

Use a CLI with push/pull methods. Treat it like email. Check once every couple hours

mute everythin that you don't need to know and check slack only a few times a day, in pre determined times, like when you arrive, after lunch and before living.

A person that is in a hurry will call you. It will not send a message.

Try using “ADHD focus music” from youtube, and see if it works for you

> Im thinking about closing Slack and opening it 2-3x a day.

Seems like an obviously good idea.

Step 1: Never accept a position where the usage of Slack is required.

Using 1000+ channels with notifications would make me ADHD instantly.

Pause notifications for 30 while you do pomodoros. Works well for me

Can you get used to just not checking things? disable the counter and notification icon on slack? I would have 20k unread emails just because the vast majority are not important at all. People lost their minds when they saw that and I reealized that it wasn't normal. I just did good work so I got away with a lot and my manager definitely gave me cover and reminded me of very important things. ofc that depends on having a solid manager

Same with slack messages. If it's not super important I learned to just not pay attention to it or get to it when I have nothing going on.

I know you already did this but I aggressively leave slack channels, especially the "fun" ones. I can see plenty of cats and boomer memes on the open internet, and showing up in the office once in a while pays way more social interaction dividends than the cheap virtual interactions on fun slack channels.

Just close slack.

Get your deep work in.

When you need a break, open it back up, address DMs and such, then...

Close it.

Are you able to just turn off the notifications?

perhaps a custom app to filter your traffic?

https://api.slack.com/

Americans have really run out of problems I see

simply turn it off during the day and check at predetermined intervals

As someone who has a similar issue with the MS teams/email divide...

Tldr: reduce reactivity and context switching. It will leave you exhausted and feeling like you are not making progress long term.

Chunk, at predetermined times for a set period. Scan information channels in a set order first, broadly sort into topics. Go through each topic and extract relevant detail/actions into a separate personal log on the topic.

Tl: One thing that is often overlooked is how this way of working puts you in to a hyper-reactive mode, taking you away from the things you had originally wanted to tackle at the beginning of the day. It is procrastination, it is your brain looking for an excuse to do something else. This will stoke the belief that, despite best intentions, you get distracted, can't work on the things you need/want to do and fail to make meaningful progress leaving you feeling tired and that you've fallen behind.

For me (read: maybe for you too, maybe not) what works is checking those channels at predefined intervals throughout the day (as you suggested) but having a prioritised list that you stick to in which ones you check, for how long, and follow that list each time. While going through, write a task oriented summary of the actions you need to take. If the information is more status/contextual/fyi on a particular thing, have a diary/log for that particular thing where you are updating you knowledge/understanding/the status of that particular thing.

For example: I'm working on a complex project right now where there are 10 separate countries all doing similar but different things across several technology stacks. Most of this is over email, so things easily get lost in a sea of email headers and signatures. Similar but different issues in different countries get mixed up. It's hard. Even without ADHD. First I generally sort all emails into folders or with labels by topic. Then I'll go through each topic separately and copy out the relevant detail and append it to a running document on that particular thing with details of who said what and when.

You can do this low tech, but I like to use obsidian to markup and further link info on things/concepts/people/dates so I can search across it later.

I hope this helps someone.

And for god's sake, turn off ALL the notifications you can!

Put a note in your status starting 'if it's urgent, call'. This is an entirely reasonable request.

Good luck

Take your pills.

I'm challenged for 40 years with loosing myself, living above the clouds, focusing heavily on things that fascinate me, procrastinating everything else until pressure kicks in and abusing whatever Dopamine stimulating stuff comes in my way. When I was a kid nobody knew about ADHD. Some Open Source communities are on Discord (SolidJS, Axum) which is challenging for me every time I need to engage. Just reading through the stuff shifts my brain into ADHD mode. Discord is a distraction machine. Slack the same. At my workplace I'm the only person who has MS Teams *only* open for meetings. People who know me are contacting me via E-Mail for years (I read 2-3 times a day), but when I leave it open I get all kinds of spontaneous calls, notifications, etc. that I interpret as a sign that my colleagues aren't organised very well anymore. The whole Office365 suite is creeping into our company and kills peoples ability to focus or being productive. For people like us who actually *feel* the extend to which those new tools (Office365, Slack, Discord) are damaging the performance of teams and the wellbeing of every individual this trend is alarming.

My advice (mostly some general stuff), that works well for me and might help you a bit if you're not already doing this:

- Avoid to much sugar and caffeine. This is tough because it boosts our ability in the short term but kicks us above the clouds (or idle mode) after. So, best is to avoid sugar at all and reduce / control caffein. Of course no alcohol or other drugs. Cold showers really help to get started instead of 3-4 cups of coffee (me).

- Restrict your Slack time to defined time slices. Talk to your boss and team. I really recommend doing your focus work in the morning. First 4 hours of the day to do focus work. In the second half of the day do organisational stuff including reading through slack, etc.

- I'm doing Yoga Nidra for over 10 years and it restores my energy and ability to focus. Any relaxation technique should work. You might look for Andrew Huberman NSDR (Non Sleep Deep Rest) tracks or similar. For me, Pomodoro Technique works well. In the 30 minutes break I do Yoga Nidra. Andrew Huberman's podcasts about this stuff are amazing, but also a great source of distraction, of course. If I should recommend one podcast then it would be the "Focus Toolkit".

- We need to avoid distractions at all costs. Our minds are jumping after every little conscious or unconscious excitement kick. So, for your (let's say 2-4) productive ours, all this stuff needs to be shut out. Including your phone.

Last: There's been a large study that comes to the conclusion, that "a wandering mind is an unhappy mind". I find that's absolutely true. That means for us highly distractible earthlings our live goal should be seeking calmness and to do this to perform systematically actions that lead us to calmness, like doing relaxation and focus training every day.

> I'm thinking about closing Slack and opening it 2-3x a day.

Do that.

> 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 this?

Also, learn to mute channels we have thousands too, I'm in about 20-50 at a given time between pruning. Out of those I only keep important, low noise channels unmuted.

Stop using Slack

I set my notifications to "Direct messages, mentioned & keywords".

This way, you can keep it open and dip into whatever you need to but you'll not be swamped with millions of notifications.

I'd also go through all channels etc and mute or leave channels you're not actually required in any more.

To be brutally honest it does not seem like Slack is the actual problem. I think you are having difficulties performing and are looking for an excuse, and Slack seems convenient. Just uninstall the Slack desktop client and use the web browser once or twice a day. Get real work done.