Context switching is more about time wasted stopping one task to pick up another. Slack's context switch is when I'm working on something else and the OS pings me to let me know someone needs me.
When Slack wants my attention, it pings me instantly, and it will ping me repeatedly if a person... is typing... like... Captain Kirk... talks.
People have tried to address[1] this sort of problem through teaching, but even if you could get people to read that, there's a degree of systemic complexity in interaction. Many situations just don't lend themselves to writing up a detailed question ahed of time.
Slack could mitigate this through technical means. Hell, the OS could do a better job. Take it further, I'd love to centralize notifications through some service across multiple devices.
One possibility is to debounce notifications as we do with events in UIs. In practice, it means Slack holds my messages for a few minutes before I get a notification. Ideally, the other person should see this so they realize I'm not going to instantly acknowledge their Hi message. And people who type bit by bit can do so knowing it won't give me a flood of notifications.
The other possibility is scheduled notification times for low priority stuff. It's good advice to work in blocks, so it'd make sense at the end of a block for notifications to pop up if they're available.
Context switching is more about time wasted stopping one task to pick up another. Slack's context switch is when I'm working on something else and the OS pings me to let me know someone needs me.
When Slack wants my attention, it pings me instantly, and it will ping me repeatedly if a person... is typing... like... Captain Kirk... talks.
People have tried to address[1] this sort of problem through teaching, but even if you could get people to read that, there's a degree of systemic complexity in interaction. Many situations just don't lend themselves to writing up a detailed question ahed of time.
Slack could mitigate this through technical means. Hell, the OS could do a better job. Take it further, I'd love to centralize notifications through some service across multiple devices.
One possibility is to debounce notifications as we do with events in UIs. In practice, it means Slack holds my messages for a few minutes before I get a notification. Ideally, the other person should see this so they realize I'm not going to instantly acknowledge their Hi message. And people who type bit by bit can do so knowing it won't give me a flood of notifications.
The other possibility is scheduled notification times for low priority stuff. It's good advice to work in blocks, so it'd make sense at the end of a block for notifications to pop up if they're available.
[1]: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html