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Ask HN: I have diagnosed ADHD and cannot work with Slack anymore – advice?
399 points by throwaway91021 on Dec 16, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 374 comments
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.

I can't concentrate at all. It's not like it's annoying, I simply cannot work.

I have been spending 10x more energy since I started to just keep above the water but now, after 10 months, I'm simply drowning and my tickets are all piling up.

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.

Any 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.


This is all great advice (especially "uninstall it from your phone").

I'll add to this that if anyone involved with Slack is around here, Slack is in desperate need of more powerful/flexible muting controls -- ie, not just muting notifications from specific channels/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't show up until it's turned back on.

When I used Slack, if it was open and there was an indicator for a channel, I checked that channel. It didn't matter if I got a notification or not, the indicator itself was enough to distract me.

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's a weakness of the muting/UI options, that the only way to really truly tame notifications for deep work in many instances is to completely block the entire app.

Edit: I consider both of these problems faced by OP (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34018044, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34014517) to be primarily UX problems that Slack could fix. Definitely the notification indicators -- putting a bright red dot on someone's screen is a distraction regardless of whether or not you also play a sound.


If you use virtual desktops disable notifications and park it in a desktop of its own. Go there to check if there are any news. That works for me. Of course no slack on the phone.


I check every single channel with unread messages.

Sometimes my best focus comes when the Slack app icon stops updating (due to some bug) and doesn't show unread message indicator anymore :) I miss messages, sometimes for hours, but then again I am able to focus without some nagging icon with its colored circle showing on it.


The whole idea of dozens of channels is just dysfunctional to begin with. OPs case of 1000+ is the worst I heard of.

Chat channels usually only have two types of contents; Announcements important enough to be sent to everyone or questions of the kind like “does anyone know how to…”. Some times you also find technical decisions although such usually happen outside the channels in other meetings.

Channels are then narrowed down into specialist areas. What I often see is that channels are only grouped by area and not by content type, so in order to catch important announcements, one must also wade through all the questions and other unrelated topics, in all the channels, to feel comfortable you are not missing out on something. At the same time helping people out on the way is very rewarding and addictive but easily consumes all your time.


I just want coloured notifications in the task tray beyond cyan and magenta.

Lot of notifications are automatic slack bots but without looking I don't know if it's a git pr or a human.


This is something that's also sorely missing from operating systems.


Just excellent!


Have you tried Slack in a browser with notifications turned off? Possibly kept in a separate browser profile, so you can quickly open and close as needed? Or even just minimized until needed.


Slack in browser with notifications off, and not at all on the phone (or disabled while not on call) is the only sane way. I will still go to check it quite a few times per day, but I would never survive if the thing is allowed to actively call my attention.


This is the way. I particularly like browser based apps. No concept of hiding out minimized when I close a tab. It's just gone until I decide to open it up again.


I still get distracted when the tab text or icon changes.


That's why you close the tab between visits :)


Pin the tab. No more tab title.


The tab icon has the notification dot that drives me crazy. I close the tab whenever I'm not using it.


I tried this myself years ago and my previous boss complained because my status was not showing up as online. This was well before 2020 when remote work was not as common as it is now, so I'm still a little annoyed by that. Also open offices, they're the physical version of Slack.


Yeah this is definitely a good idea but I think personally I need the structure of having specific set times to check it, as opposed to it just always being an option whenever I encounter a boring or difficult task.


It's incredible that this isn't the official recommended way to use slack in a large organization. It shouldn't even ask to issue notifications if there will be a ridiculous frequency of them. Organizations will eventually not purchase a service if that service destroys productivity.


This is pretty good advice. I'll add onto this:

- Your company is idiotic in how they use Slack. With what I assume is a large company (1000+ channels) teams shouldn't have to respond to mentions with the possible exception of people directly on your team. Suggest/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'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.

- 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'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's true that HR is there to protect the company and not you, and in this situation that's exactly what they'll do: protect the company from an ADA lawsuit by accommodating your disability)

To be quite honest I'm not even sure your ADHD is actually the problem here. Your company sounds like a nightmare.


These, or something very similar, are essential to concentration. It's just not possible otherwise. The problem is this means nothing if the work culture is an expectation of always being available. So it's not entirely a technical problem (like many work problems).


Even if it's not an always-available thing, how you can control Slack really depends on expectations - especially working remote. Do my colleagues and mentees really want to be blocked for two hours because they need a two-minute input from me?

I have set Slack up so that certain things alert me, and most channels are just muted, but as others pointed out more fine-grain controls would be even better. Really just "only notifications for DMs for these people" would be a great QoL.


On the other hand your organization could be built to be more async or if you do require input from people who can’t respond immediately, there is probably other stuff that can be worked on.

80% of my team is located in India while I’m in the US so none of our working hours overlap (meetings are scheduled early US time / late India time). Stuff can still get done without same-day responses.


These are solid advice. I've also had slack utterly destroy productivity, it is very unfortunate it has become popular.

I don't have the slack app anywhere, I just access it via browser.

I don't keep a tab open on it. I'll close the tab when I'm done and only reopen it via bookmark next time I need.

I configure it to send me email if anyone mentions me. Of course, need to also make sure email notifications are all off. I'll check email about hourly or between meetings or completed tasks.

In the absence of any email notifications from slack, I'll check it only at a few set times during that day. Times vary based on org culture but ideally not more than three times a day (morning, lunch, evening).

If these technical solutions work for you, they can work great. But of course the worst part about slack is how it incentivizes this hyper-toxic culture of everyone monitoring chat all day long above all else. If your company culture has fallen into that pit and people get angry at you for not answering every bit of trivia within 30 seconds, I wish I knew of a solution other than quitting.


This is also great advice in the event email (or anything else) that distracts you at work.

Essentially, don't process in real-time. Process in batches a few times a day.


I don't have ADHD either and remember last time that I worked for a company that used that tool as something that drained me of energy with all the distractions. It's great when you want to do something and need to communicate something to your team (to read whenever they are ready) or write near real time with someone about a problem.

Chat apps should, besides a dark mode have a mute mode and distraction free mode with a way to communicate for certain individuals or groups.

Slack sucks and is probable the single source of most wasted developer hours besides open offices. :)


I do all of these things, have ADHD, and I can confirm it’s helped me preserve my sanity the last few years.

I’ve also come to terms with the fact that I most likely will never be that “hero” on my team who responds to a slack question or actions an ask right away - I just don’t have the mental bandwidth to be heads down and context switch 5 times an hour.

I also only check email twice a day

Anything you can do to be more defensive and purposeful with your time, the better


I just tell everyone that if it’s not urgent enough to call me (on my phone), it can wait.


I apply this the reverse way too. Is this message I am sending important enough that I would call them to tell or ask the same thing?


The whole point of sending a message instead of calling them is the expectation that they will look at it and respond at a later time when it doesn't disturb them. If it were urgent, I'd call.


We use email for that. Besides, if the intention is for Slack to be as async as email, then why do we need to have notifcations and plings and red badges?


Oh, that's basically stopped where I am. That's for official things that you need to be able to find back later, and for external people.


Fantastic advice! one (optional, but highly recommended) to add:

turn off your presence/away status.

Just because you’re online does not automatically give permission to bug you. This however goes both ways. So make sure you do eventually respond to others. But there’s no expectation of replying right now.


I turned off presence in early 2020 and I've never looked back. Far fewer people ping me about things I don't care about now.

I think expecting to get a reply instantly is a big part of why people bother you on Slack. Having to wait for a reply seems to cut out much of the noise.


Unrelated - did you go from management back to IC? Or a quieter management role.


I started a small agency and do consulting. So now I’m a guest in various different project channels across several client Slack teams + manage my own contractors etc. Much quieter :)


I was going to give a flavor of the same advice. This is solid Slack guidance and if followed will work.


you can also turn off notifications or tweak them by channel - you can turn off @here and @channel too.


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 don't have ADHD and yet I still do all of this. Removing all notification dots/numbers, no previews, muting channels, suppressing mentions in some channels, separating channels into "infrequent"/"team"/"org" sections and keeping some collapsed (looking at them once a day). On mobile removing notification sound, preview and also removing notification from lock screen (only allowing in notification center).

You can also set your status to permanent "responses will be delayed". No one has the right to my attention within a few seconds (except when oncall). I use slack the way it makes me productive.


How do you manage to not click on the slack icon despite having seen the red dot ? When I see the notification icon, I won't be able to focus on something else until I cleared the notification.


Turn off icon badging as well. No notifications really means _no_ notifications. This is the way.


But then there's the anxiety of waiting like 4 hours, opening it, and seeing a bunch of critical messages you weren't around for. I need either a robot that will gently tap me on the shoulder and quietly tell me to check my notifications, or somehow relay the badge to a collar on my dog so he can bark at me. The badge is the worst. The sounds are the worst. At this point I rather just have a landline people can call me on with a voice machine.


> there's the anxiety of waiting like 4 hours, opening it, and seeing a bunch of critical messages you weren't around for.

Tell people to call your phone if it is urgent. Everything else can wait 4 hours, right?


I've completely forgotten about the era when anyone could screen their own calls with the equipment they already had, they just needed to figure out "oh I should let _every_ call go to voicemail after one ring and wait to hear who it actually is first"

How did we go backwards? rhetorical question, but can we bring it back with what we currently have?


I have that on my Pixel phone, if it detects a number that isn't in my contacts, it'll auto-screen the call and provide me with a text transcript of their response. I can see what the person says and choose to answer or let them just continue on to leave a message.

And if it thinks it's actually a spam call, I don't even get it ringing, it just quietly "handles" it (but obviously takes a message so I can call back if it was wrong).


ah, that's neat! on my iphone the only option is to send all calls that aren't in my contacts to voicemail, which is just me saying "please send me a text message"


It feels like we're getting back to that with focus states in iOS and Android, but half my apps still don't tell the API who sent the message and just set the notification title... (and some do but they don't link it to the contact, so the anti-DND rule never goes off)


>How did we go backwards?

By incentivizing smart people to tinker with silly crap instead of work on meaningful problems.


You can hide the app (no badge, no dot visible) and snooze notifications, but leave them on system-wide, and then if someone mentions you with something important, they can click the "yes this is important" confirmation link. (And if someone abuses that then you can mute them personally)


set profile description telling people to call or text you if urgent


I still click it, but I disabled mentions on some more public channels so it doesn't happen as often. If it appears a lot and I need to get stuff done, I just drag Slack into the expanded tray so I don't even see the dot. (the numberless dot, not the [1] badge)


Use the 'mark as unread' as a todo list, so you often have a dot and become desensitized.


Make sure to subscribe to a channel that is super busy that you don’t care the slightest bit about. That way it will always be red dot and it will mean nothing to you.


i personally use the hide feature for the dock.


I have ADHD, and this is how I use Slack too. Works wonders and makes it manageable.

Another thing I've found useful is just leaving channels where I find little to no value. If there's something important you need to be involved in, 99% of the time you'll get added back and can catch-up to contribute. In my experience with Slack, you end up in channels for "visibility" on things that have no impact on you and you have no impact on.


Exactly this! Mute channels, adjust your notifications, and if it's still annoying, just turn it off. You can always turn it back on and check it when you're ready and it's time to talk with people.

I think I have mine set so I only get pinged if there's a direct @ mention of my name. Sometimes I miss some stuff, but also, I get to miss stuff. If it's important, someone will ping me directly.


Yeah, I have notifications off for all software on all devices I use. I absolutely cannot stand nag crap showing up on my screen. You can imagine how much I love the modern web :)


My mobile slack can make notifications but can't make any sounds. Feels like a good level of 'can get in touch' without disrupting me when I'm not looking at my phone for a while.


You can have a custom sound that's silence, and set it to that!


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.


How do you remove the desktop-switching animation on macOS? I'd like to use the virtual desktops feature but the animation is unbearably slow, and I was unable to find a way to disable it online even after extensive searching.

Afaik "just use Linux" still isn't an option on my 2019 (Intel) MBP due to lack of support for basic stuff like Wi-Fi and keyboard :(


System Preferences > Accessibility > Display > enable "Reduce motion"

Though I think this reduces motion on everything, not just the virtual desktop animations. I don't mind that but YMMV.


Omg, THANKS!


Wow. Thank you so much too!


If you really want to run linux, get a Lenovo Thinkpad. They actually test the hardware with linux distros and even have bios options for Linux sleep states, labeled as such. Give the Macbook to someone who wants to run MacOS. The X1 Carbon line is my favorite, with excellent battery life for basic coding and video watching. Also, power options to set the maximum charge to 80% to preserve the life of the battery. (lithium ion batteries last nearly forever if you keep the charge between 20% and 80%) And yes, it has so much battery to spare that that middle 60% is enough to last a day of coding.


I have the animations off entirely, be warned though, it requires disabling SIP which is a non starter for many corporate environments.

If you install yabai[0] with its scripting addition, you can configure hotkeys to change spaces with no animations. It's pretty powerful, and I have specific keybinds[1] to do things such as transition to a space with a specific application running.

[0]: https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai

[1]: https://github.com/worm-emoji/dotfiles/blob/140c9fd614ebfc54...


It’s been a while since I set OSX up but there are Super User threads about it. I end up searching each time for the latest methods because I haven’t been able to get it quite as instant as Win/Linux but close enough.

https://superuser.com/questions/35144/speed-up-osx-spaces-by...


There is an app for this. Reduce motion is still slow fade animation. The app was a little buggy but mostly worked like Linux tiling window managers.

The apps price was a few bucks. I can’t remember the name of it, but I’m looking an will edit if I find it.

Edit: no dice. All I can do is assure you it’s technically possible and some external WM apps out there may do it for you


Can’t you just do the 3 finger side swipe to move between desktops?


I don't know how anyone lives without this. I have six desktops on my MBP with a similar organization:

1. Communication apps

2. Project management, todo lists

3+. Data science and work tools - RStudio, Excel, etc

There is a left-to-right flow: communication influences project roadmaps and to-do lists, which influence what actually gets done. You hang out on the right unless you need info from the left.


Thanks for explaining the reasoning of the left to right ordering, makes total sense! Will try this setup on Monday :-)


Yeah, I think for multiple desktops the key is a stable organization. Otherwise there's a lot of frustration because much of what you're doing is not on your current desktop and you're going to be hunting for it, and where is it this time?

The left-to-right principle also helps with the organization of the work desktops, which is more fluid and project-dependent.


Do you tile your windows as well, or just keep one-ish app in each desktop? I.e. do you switch between desktops and windows all the time, or only between desktops usually?


I don't really tile but it might be mostly because of lack of imagination. Sometimes I manually tile two windows side by side, like if I'm scrolling through something and taking notes on it on the side.

RStudio is tiled by design, and that is super helpful.


Super interesting! I've had pretty much the exact same division of virtual desktops for many, many years. Small variation in what is on the desktops, but it's more like, 40 years old editor instead of VSCode and Jupyter notebooks instead of Excel. The intent of the distinct desktops is very, very similar.


Funny, this is exactly to the point how I have it. Unfortunately I haven't found a way to remove animations on OSX, but works well regardless.


How do you prevent ⌘+Tab from automatically jumping you between desktops? At that point, the desktops feel like impediments, not boundaries.


It's possible to disable that, see https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4995042


There is some software to have a windows-like alt-tab experience, and you can decide to filter to current desktop or not


What is this miracle software?


Some of the alternatives I've tried https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/ https://noteifyapp.com/command-tab-plus/ https://contexts.co/ https://manytricks.com/witch/


Also rcmd https://lowtechguys.com/rcmd/


https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/


Thank you all with the suggestions!


Me too, more or less!

Workspace 1: main project, development #2: secondary project, if any #3,4: wildcards, depending on what I need #5: VM management #6: remote screen sessions, admin stuff #7: music #8: email, communications

FireFox browser profile for main work stuff has redirects to keep me off of reddit, etc.

Multi-desktop-crew unite (:


How often do you use “do not disturb” or some similar mechanism to disable notifications?


Desktops, monitors, or any amount of tech doesn't solve the organizational problem of constantly interrupting employees with excessive distractions.


I've had this exact setup for nearly a decade. Sometimes Slack (or Google Chat) ends up on desktop four.

It really cuts down on distractions.


It’s cool to see others have ended up with similar setups. Desktop four started as either a vm or vnc/rdp client for software that wouldn’t run locally. So that’s why it remains as the catch-all.


For me it housed mocp (later Spotify) and a GUI file manager on occasion. It's nice to leave the first three desktops clean.


Similar here. I’ve blocked all distractions in ublock on my dev and general browsers.

Stage manager actually helps a lot


How do you manage virtual desktops on windows? I used to but found it annoying to maintain which windows go where, when restarting would always reset the settings


https://dexpot.de/?lang=en is really good.

It has hotkey support and pretty much everything you can ask for to quickly manage and switch between desktops and toggle common window attributes like "always on top".


Win10+ has virtual desktops built in, before that I used the SysInternals Desktops utility.

To get Alt-1,2,3,4 working I use AutoHotKey. I can’t recall which script I use (been ages since I changed it) but it works like this one with some edits for keys.

https://github.com/pmb6tz/windows-desktop-switcher

For windows I definitely recommend also installing PowerToys. You can set up different snap grids for each desktop. Keeps things tidy with no overlapping windows.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/


Yeah I used to use W10's virtual desktops; I got tired of having to reconfigure the desktops every time I rebooted the laptop. Big fan of powertoys, although I keep forgetting all the tools it has to utilize though xP

I'll hafta see if they've updated it, and look into fancy zones. They look like the tiling manager I've always wanted in windows


This is an interesting take. What type of virtual desktop do you use?


macOS has it built in, as does windows. There’s a mention of yabai upthread which takes it to the next level.


This is pretty good advice. But if you are going to hide the slack desktop while you are working then you should let people know. Otherwise, people will expect a response real time and wonder why you are ignoring them. It's human nature.


If you always respond instantly you set that expectation for the future. I wouldn’t be expected to respond immediately if I were presenting over Zoom, had just left for a bathroom/drink break, on an important call, or was in the middle of an careful process anyway.

It’s not as if I ignore it completely, I can check Desktop 1 for flashing notifications with a simple left hand only Alt-1, and be back on my working desktop in like a second. That quickly becomes as autonomic as Ctrl-l, n, e, Enter when I’m in a browser.


IMHO expecting synchronous behaviour from asynchronous tools is flawed way to operate; I'd be very comfortable taking a stand against manning these communication channels at all times.


Really depends. At our company there's no expectation that you'll answer Slack messages in real time.


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?


It starts with a culture where I'm not sweating the fact that I haven't checked my Slack notifications in a while.

Slack is used like a kitchen sink in the two places I've used it - there is no easy way to determine what is urgent vs what can wait. One literally has to comb through all the red dots to filter them. If you believe channels solve this because you can create dedicated channels for the important stuff, very soon someone starts abusing the responsiveness on this channel to their selfish ends, first seeking an exception, and very soon making it a habit.

To top this, the Slack UX is literally designed to maximize the time one spends with it. I often find myself on Slack intending to either - 1. Check one of the important channels or 2. Recollect something someone shared that I now need to use

And before I know it, I'm responding to something that I didn't need to at this time. I often also forget why I came here in the first place.

Yes, email and ticketing are also pervaded by spam, but Slack is essentially a corporate sponsored, culturally accepted medium for noise and distraction with no easy way to apply controls.

You typically need strong leadership to define the constraints through culture, because the tool by itself isn't designed for this.


I completely agree.

I am so fed up with this problem that I'm not going to mince words.

Nobody wants to be told they're disorganized and sloppy, but people outside engineering (especially sales and client people) are the absolute worst. They're the ones with the ADHD.

Engineers rarely have trouble with deep focus on work unless they're constantly being nagged by idiots who don't understand what they're costing the company.

There's a strong business case against the abuse of chat for "quick questions" or whatever other bullshit people are too dumb to figure out on their own if they just spent a few seconds more in thought before bothering anyone else.


I'm curious about what you mean by "inbound". It sounds like messages from someone "outside" but not sure if that is probably a limited definition.


Inbound = something that requires a response/action. Could be an automated alert that creates a ticket, could be a slack message from someone asking for something.

If you're not great with it every message can feel like an inbound and you're compelled to go cycle through all the channels and read everything whether it's immediately relevant or not.


I think the meaning of inbound here refers to work that is defined or asked of you or a team via Slack instead of via more thought-out and defined work.


I mean sources of incoming work, could be a quick question, an ask for something, automated alarm or a bug.

Slack makes it super hard to stay on top of this and systematically triage the low from the high value.


Thank you


Indeed, very much this. We spent some efforts structuring this at work and now we have 2-3 rules in place. First off, all requests for work and services are always issues either directly in the ticket system, or via mail to a central mail address. Nothing from chat will reliably trigger any work done.

However, we have defined a role "first contact". This role rotates on a weekly basis, and whoever is first contact has the job of monitoring some well-known channels for requests. They then act as a first level support pretty much, helping people to figure out how to best request what they need. They also handle mails that aren't automatically handled in the central mailbox.

The latter in turn enables the team to just ignore pretty much all chat notifications outside of the team. First contact person will ensure they are heard, and first contact person will also address high severity tickets directly to people after creation. And as much as that sounds like a slower process, it has improved our resolution times because people aren't distracted as much.


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.


This is sage advice - I think of slack like the bystander effect - if nobody is explicitly asking you to do something you aren't accountable, but you can help out if you feel like it when it suits you.

If they want a formal response SLA they can use an appropriate tool like service now and its overheads.


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...


Interesting links, thanks!

(in case it helps anyone else...) About half a year ago I discovered that a brutally low carb diet -- leading to being in ketosis -- drastically helped my ADHD as well as other mental health things I've struggled with for my entire life. I wish I knew earlier!


I don't think I actually put this together until I read your comment. My actual diagnosis came just after I went off keto after having been doing it pretty steadily for about 3 years. I wonder now if the reason I noticed the symptoms of lack of focus more prior to seeking help and my diagnosis now was because it was better controlled while I was on keto and in ketosis.

I know looking back I still had symptoms. I can remember days during those 3 years just sitting in the office and realizing I had not gotten a single thing actually done and it was mid-afternoon already. But also had stretches of incredible productivity also.

Thanks for the prompt - been considering going back on keto, one of the reasons I went off is the mixed scientific evidence for its efficacy over other diets (not specifically for weight loss, just diet in the context of "way of eating") and some warnings about the lack of long-term study data because it's so hard for individuals to stay on long term. But this gives me another data point to consider and something to watch if I do try it again.


My random opinion: It's best to go on Keto intermittently; say 2 month on, 2 months off, or similar variation. I would be hesitant to be on it permanently, but doing it off and on feels safer to me.

One of the nice things, for me, in terms of having been on Keto occassionally, if that it's given me the ability to go for extended periods without needing to eat. I don't crash, in terms of blood sugar, the way I used to. Even when I'm not eating super low carb.


Ketogenic diets likely increase insulin sensitivity, which may explain your experience.


Two things that might also work, but be easier.

Supplement MCT oil. This turns into keytones in the body. See The Complete Book of Ketones by Mary Newport for all the science. She's got into it for Alzheimers, but the applicability is wider than that.

Go gluten-free and casein-free. That's eliminating wheat and dairy in your diet. Both of these turn into a form of morphine in the body. Look up glutomorphine and casomorphine. A slightly easier diet to stick to than keto. This cured my aspergers.


>Go gluten-free and casein-free. That's eliminating wheat and dairy in your diet. Both of these turn into a form of morphine in the body. Look up glutomorphine and casomorphine. A slightly easier diet to stick to than keto. This cured my aspergers.

This cure for Autism is broadly related to the leaky gut hypothesis of autism, rather infamously propagated by Andrew Wakefield in the 90s more generally and Jenny McCarthy more specifically went after gluten/casein in the 2000s. PETA made an infamous ad saying that milk causes Autism [1] because milk has Casein. This is to say that enough noise got made about this specific claim it got researched a bit.

Generally this diet has specifically been studied for autism treatment and the efficence of it's efficacy is very lacking for me [2][3]

This all being said, this doesn't necessarily mean that nobody can benefit from a casein or gluten free diet, there's simply insufficient evidence to say that people who avoid milk and bagels are autistic less often/less autistic.

[1] https://www.dairyreporter.com/var/wrbm_gb_food_pharma/storag...

[2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-019-04266-9

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7651765/


The problem with those studies is that a Gluten free or a gluten and dairy free diet is not enough to actually treat "leaky gut" or similar issues. It's a bit like saying you can fix an ecosystem by removing two invasive species from the environment. Sure, it might work, but it's such an oversimplification that the results will appear random, or, "inconclusive."

Studying diets is notoriously difficult, and rarely done in a helpful way. Everybody has a different internal ecosystem -- as well as different dietary stimulus, even if they're following the same diet. This makes it incredibly difficult to draw broad conclusions based on controlling just one or two dietary factors.

This is rather unfortunate -- because the right dietary treatments can be truly transformative for many people, for a variety of conditions. However, because of the difficulty of proving this scientifically, such treatments are ignored by the medical community, leaving patients to figure this avenue of treatment out on their own.

The answer, in my opinion, is massive funding -- the kind of funding that can compete with billion dollar drugs (such as Humira). However, that's really not going to happen. Oh well. Sorry for the rant!


They have done studies that showed that it "helped" about 60% of the time (sorry I don't have the reference). "Helped" is a far weaker term than cured. I've read some of McCarthy's books and this is often the first thing to be tried. Often there is a long path to finding a workable cure for a specific person.

I went GFCF for other reasons (IBS and excess mucus production) and was surprised when my Asperger's started to go away. My personal theory is that the small, but frequent, morphine effects interfere with learning. When you take that away, low level learning can begin again.

I was "face blind" (i.e. didn't automatically recognize familiar faces) and didn't pick up on social cues. Both problems when away after 6-12mo on GFCF. A lot of social awkwardness comes from not picking up on these fundamental inputs.


Cool. Thanks!

Already using MCT oil in lots of cooking :) Had no idea about dairy... interesting, I eat a lot of high fat cheese.

Thanks for the references, I'll certainly read more.


I had the impression that the gluten/casein morphin thesis has been debunked.


A reference would be helpful :-)

Gluten and dairy are in almost all packaged foods. They drive cravability in a big way. So I'm guessing any "debunking" was funded by someone making money from this.

There are a few people who are immune to the effect. You can pick them out because they either dislike or simply don't care for cheese (which is mostly casein).


Andrew Huberman recently had a Harvard educated psychiatrist on the podcast. This psychiatrist specialized in treatment resistant mental health conditions. He was trying to help a patient lose weight and inadvertently found it helped their psychiatric symptoms as well. Fast forward 5 years and he had written a book, and the tl;dr is that he has seen many patients improve their conditions be going low / no carb. For patients with less extreme disease they can often get by with low carb and eliminate fructose but keep some healthy complex carbs in their diets. Seriously ill patients may benefit more from full ketosis. In any case, he often reports patients are able to reduce or sometimes eliminate medications on this diet which helps when they have trouble with the side effect profiles.


This episode, right? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjEFo3a1AnI

Dr. Chris Palmer: Diet & Nutrition for Mental Health | Huberman Lab Podcast #99

> My guest this episode is Chris Palmer, M.D., a board-certified psychiatrist and assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He explains the important connection between nutrition, metabolism and mental health and his pioneering work using the ketogenic diet to successfully treat patients with various mental illnesses, including depression and schizophrenia. Dr. Palmer explains how the ketogenic diet is an evidenced-based treatment for epilepsy, mimics the fasted state and can offset the cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s. He describes the key roles of mitochondria in mental health, how certain conditions likely arise from mitochondrial dysfunction, and how low-carbohydrate diets increase mitochondrial turnover to improve mental health. He also explains how low-carbohydrate diets positively impact the gut microbiome and weight loss, important risk factors for mitochondrial health such as marijuana and alcohol, and the best way to increase circulating ketones depending on individual needs. We also cover how a ketogenic diet impacts mood, sleep, and fertility. Dr. Palmer’s work stands as a revolutionary approach to mental health and disease that, given the prevalence of mental health challenges, should be of interest to people of all backgrounds and ages.


Yep:)


I've been trying a ketogenic diet since listening to this episode and over the past few days have noticed an improvement in not only my ADHD symptoms, but a decrease in anxiety as well. I'm very optimistic about this, though I'm skeptical about being on keto in the long term.

I've seen similar effects with intermittent fasting combined with a whole foods plant-based diet. This will likely be my long-term strategy.


You wonder if it's mostly the weight-loss that solved the problems, and if a person loses weight by strict calorie counting, carbs or not, would it have the same effect.


I would recommend "why we get fat" by Gary Taubes. Calorie counting has be disproved so many times, but it sticks around despite the science being against it. If you're a doctor or researcher, "Good calories, bad calories" is the same material but at a clinician's level.

Low carb diets get insulin down and ketones up. These factors are more likely to be driving these other changes.

Also, low carb diets generally eliminate wheat and therefore gluten. Gluten becomes gluteomophin, which causes it's own problems (as an opiate). The standard American diet micro-doses an opiate at every meal. What could go wrong?


Low carb diet helps, so do others based on the person. Intermittent fasting + exercise + vitamins helps everyone no matter what diet.


I did keto 3 weeks ago.

After 3 days of it, I felt very focused and got done a bunch of stuff I was procrastinating for months.

I thought this was a coincidence.


Please don't give advice like this on the Internet; you are not a qualified physician, you do not know what this person's life actually is, what medicines they're currently taking, what allergies they have, etc.

You could literally kill someone with the wrong "benign" advice at the wrong time. Turning off Slack won't kill anyone (probably) but suggesting a diet or medication very well could.

Just don't do it.


A suggestion to look into something, with links to start the research, on a forum like this.

Totally fine. People can do their own research on this forum, if someone is on special meds, they are smart enough to check with doctor before implementing something weird.

Besides, a dietary change is going to have slow effects, plenty of time for correcting mistakes.


It's not "totally fine" it's wildly irresponsible and dangerous, and frankly should be banned.


I was glad that he shared what helped him, and after reading your plea to prevent people from accessing this information, doubly so. You should especially be ashamed for trying to keep people struggling with mental health issues in that state.


Talk to a medical professional before engaging in any change to your diet or medication, especially if you have mental health issues.

This kind of thing is how you spiral out of control, I've seen it dozens of times. You and anyone else struggling need to find QUALIFIED people to help you, not random Internet people.

Your life literally depends on doing what I'm saying here, not in experimenting with fad diets and snake oil medications.


Me? Did you reply to the wrong post? If you didn't, why would you think I don't have a doctor and and a nutritionist, and why would you think I am looking for a new nutrition plan? You don't know 24+ people who have had this problem, either.


There's a concept in English called the "royal you", I do recommend you (specifically you) look it up.


No one is going to believe you originally meant that. I'm sorry. You are so bad for the health of the people around you and a poor discussion partner. :(


I just.. on so many levels, I see your response here as a lower form of human communication. Honestly, and I get how pretentious that sounds, but you sound like a wounded, broken animal.

As if you're hardly even human; the embodiment of your own insecurities, lashing out in confusion about how the world around you works. You spout whatever combination of words would hurt you most to others, a whirling dervish of emotional weakness and impotency.

There's no light in your eyes is there? Just a dead, cowlike stare, a ring of sclera revealing your panicked ego constantly assessing how you fit in with the other apes, dreading even the tiniest perception of loss.

And honestly? It probably doesn't get better. This is probably it for you, there's not likely to be a grand improvement in your life or how you perceive reality. That panic will never go away, that confusion and anger is just who you are now.

You apparently rage against medicine, you rage against people who actually understand reality, but mostly you rage against yourself; this is it. This is you. You are a pile of fear and frustration from incompetence, just like you were as a child, and you'll never be anything more.


Here's what a typical primary care physician will do: prescribe you non-stimulant ADHD medication with potentially terrible side effects and since those don't work for a lot of people, they will move on to prescribing amphetamines with terrible side effects. Most physicians receive little training in nutrition (I believe one class is standard).

You should consider reevaluating your blind faith in physicians (they were an instrumental part of the opioid crisis after all), especially when it drives you to make a dismissive comment like this in response to a benign suggestion about a dietary change that you seemingly haven't evaluated before responding. Here the individual has seen success with this approach for themselves and others and is simply sharing their experience. They're not suggesting anything extreme or dangerous.


People like you kill others because of your ego. You should feel deep, profound shame and guilt for how much damage you cause to society.

Your ideas are how we got the Ivermectin craze, for example.

Shame on you.


All of these links are about autism, not ADHD. Am I missing something?


Autism is a wide spectrum. Some would consider ADHD part if it. If nothing else, there is lots of overlap.


I have both and I’ve often thought the same. There are so many symptoms in one that are synonymous with the other.

Asperger’s is just a tad bit more on the socially awkward side: inability to understand social cues being a big one. I learned to fake it and it took me a long time to develop genuine empathy in situations demanding raw emotion. I’m still awkward sometimes - unsure of what the socially acceptable response is in a situation.

This is in sharp contrast to my spouse who is also ADHD. She is more easily distracted and has higher dysfunction. Yet, she is socially more aware and talking to people is second nature to her.


I have the social awkward side with the same inability to understand social cues, after many decades I can fake it, but still come across as odd or strange. I guess its the uncanny valley effect. The emotions and empathy is however the opposite, its so strong and raw I have to try and shut it down as its overwhelming.


It's pretty common in discussions about Autism to talk about ADHD due to strong comorbidity in that direction.


OP didn't ask for advice about how to treat their condition. Presumably they prefer to hear that from their doctor, rather than from every stranger they mention their diagnosis to.


If the quality of doctors follows the same distribution as that one of SW engineers, taking advice of a stranger might have a similar use as looking for answers on stack overflow. After all, they are all self-taught..


> If the quality of doctors follows the same distribution as that one of SW engineers

How could you possibly think that it does, considering the entire ocean of difference between their education and training???


Does that have much of an impact on distribution? I don't think so. You still gonna have ones which are very good at their job, some are average and the rest is part of the long tail.

Edit: Also in context of the conversation above, what I wanted to suggest is that that information can still be very valuable to whoever reads it. Even if it comes from someone who is not a doctor.


It absolutely does narrow the distribution substantially.


What makes you think OP needs advice for ADHD treatment? He was diagnosed by a mental health professional. He may be taking medications that work quite well in the right environment.


Why do you assume this advice will make the OP abandon whatever they're doing now and jump to try it?

There are other people suffering from ADHD reading this thread. Some of us appreciate exchange of advice as more avenues to explore - for example, because current treatment regimen (medication and/or otherwise) is working well, and so not worth the risk of messing with it, but could use some addition to address remaining problems. There is no perfect cure for this, there's only stacking person-specific partial solutions until hopefully reaching diminishing returns.


What makes you think OP is a he?


Also helps with kidney stones. Eugh


Damn it, they have tea on that list of oxalates. Adderal to the rescue!


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.


I would add: delete the slack app, and use it from a browser. Then you'll only get notifications when the browser is in the foreground. (Of course assuming you've disabled browser notifications).

This way you can leave slack running, you will show up as available, but will not be disturbed unless the slack tab is in the foreground. (Or someone makes a call).


That's a great tip for reducing notifications further. Alert fatigue is a bigger problem than organisations often realise.


Another big advantage of using Slack in a browser is being able to customize everything using addons like Stylus (I customize colours and fonts).


I also used Ublock Origin to remove the "Bob is typing..." bit from underneath the text input box. I hate typing indicators.


oh good point. someone should write an extension that only pings you based on critical rules, like if someone writes "bump", or "hey were you able to check on that?" or if 5 DMs have piled up, then it releases the notification. Honestly slack should do this themselves


Great idea!


>someone should write an extension that only pings you based on critical rules, like if someone writes "bump", or "hey were you able to check on that?" or if 5 DMs have piled up, then it releases the notification. Honestly slack should do this themselves


Thanks for the shoutout re https://dispatch.do


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.


Haha I just posted here that we seriously switched to MS Teams at some point for that exact reason, but couldn’t stomach it, it really is just worse than “bad enough not to use it much”


A sad salute from a company which mandated teams and force installed it on every person’s desktop.


Slack is getting there “are you sure you wanna make a call, huddles! (presses yes) … are you sure you wanna make a call, huddles! (presses yes) … are you sure you wanna make a call, huddles! (presses yes) …”

And channel bloat that makes my Christmas tree lights jealous.


Slack is right. Calls only work in app and huddles work everywhere including Firefox. Make you coworkers' day sunny by never using calls.


Omg, Chats and Teams separation which forces you to constantly click between these is real ADHD amplifier. Company switched from Slack to Teams because the latter comes free with Office365. I hate it!


Only click on Teams if you have notifications. Otherwise I only look at teams twice a week. Teams are unusable otherwise as you have to scroll around the multi-scren channel list and everyone involved should be already aware of that and always @mention everyone needed.


Believe it or not, Teams/Outlook are actually a lot less awful on Mac OS.


Not sure how you came to that conclusion regarding outlook, one of the reasons I moved to Windows from osx was the mac version of outlook was so terrible.


This is so true though.


How lucky, we use Zoom as team's chat.


You had me in the first half there


Haha brilliant


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.


The first person to write a chatgpt slack bot called Anton that reads all of your local corp docs will make a mint (with security controls)

Free idea folks.


Was thinking about exactly same idea to automate my job last week. We just need something local to to train, like Stable Diffusion.


ok bet


That's an excellent solution. I think part of it is also being comfortable and firm and not teaching others that "Hey he's the go to guy and he answers questions immediately and is super helpful". Eventually the problem sorts itself out. And even if it doesn't, so what, you're one person. There are limits and real costs to being a human operating switchboard.


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)


+1

And if you're in a role where you are expected to respond promptly (say, you're an SRE or sysadmin that's on-call) there should be other, better avenues to reach out like a ticketing system, pagerduty or opsgenie, etc.


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.


Parenting?


Let me attempt to explain what I think he meant.

Some families are dysfunctional. Addictions can be big here, but the personalities of the parents can drive this without any alcohol or drug use. Often, the families that look the best from the outside are the most dysfunctional inside. There is a whole rabbit warren that I'm attempting to not dive down here. Suffice to say, it's not uncommon and it's not obvious.

Children in dysfunctional families often become hyper vigilant in order to control their life and avoid conflict. This works to an extent, but they become trained to constantly pay attention to everything, all the time. Which is one way to look at ADD.

If you want to research this more, look up: * Adult children of alcoholics and dysfunctional families * Complex PTSD by Pete Walker * Patrick Teahan videos on YouTube


Pretty close. This not my anon account. So I won't be saying anything more.


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.


Yes, unread messages is the best way to consume slack.


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


Exactly. If you’re constantly available you’ll spend all your time on Slack fielding unrefined queries. “Hey did someone on your team touch X recently, because blah blah blah.” Just turn off notifications and ignore it. If it’s important for you personally, it will eventually end up in your email. Let all the people who (for whatever reasons) want to be constantly available be your low pass filter.


> 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.


I have ADHD and this is what I would recommend. Dual screen is okay if you implement the rest as long as the task occupies both screens (e.g code in one and tests, type checking or a live demo on the other).

I’d go further and suggest turning off _all_ sounds and vibrations your phone period, including for calls.

If that’s a bit extreme, do it for work hours, but turning them off completely is life changing. With them on, it’s too easy for your phone to dominate your attention.

Your phone needs to be something you give attention to on your own terms, as a tool that you control.

You might wonder about urgent alerts, like waiting for an important call or on call notifications. Your habits simply change to give the appropriate amount of attention, like a quick glance every now and then at an interval of your choosing. And, more often than not, an urgent call can be called back.


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 was going to ask: Why the ... does anyone have 1000+ Slack channels? What's the point of so many channels?

We have maybe 20 IRC channels, and that to much as well. Many join all of them anyway, two of them are basically the same thing, bot hang around in random channels with no clear distinction as to why it's in one and not another. I cannot imagine the corporate structure that would trigger the creation of 1000 Slack channels, honestly Slack might just be a symptom.

On a side note: I still don't get Slack, it's like one of those Chinese: Do everything apps, the interface is cluttered and not particularly intuitive to use. It really makes you long for the days of HipChat.


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 know how you feel, after a few years of fully remote working, that knocking sound makes me cringe and twitch.

The fear response is real.


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

You're such a good writer! Goddamn, you gave me the chills just with this line.


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.


A few years ago a friend wrote a bit of webshit that you could inject into the slack desktop client that would give you a local "ignore" (by hiding elements or something).

I wish Slack proper has that feature.


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.


Also I'd really strongly suggest that you push your company away from a team @ alias and toward a team channel. The only groups that should have an @ alias that punches through notification settings are on-call, and if your role IS on-call then no amount of Slack changes will reduce interrupts.


People create one @ alias per team and also many others for subteams or temporary project teams, etc. There is one for oncall too. Every time one of those aliases gets tagged, I get a notification, an orange counter or sometimes messages from Slackbot asks me to join the channels.

*> punches through notification settings

I'd like to specify which aliases should not be ignored but I can't in Slack, unless I'm missing something.

Also, disabling the oragen counter is not possible (even for muted channels).


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.)


I'm getting a lot of red flags from this website. It reads like a marketing campaign to sell the writers books and vitamins. All of the "evidence" is anecdotal. As someone who struggled with ADHD their whole life, it's demeaning to read. "Your kid has ADHD? Oh he just needs some niacin."


Guy is a total quack. Literally vitamins to cure cancer.


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?


> Is your management chain aware that you are diagnosed with ADHD

No, and I don't think it will help, to be honest. They will just start paying even more attention to my work and decide it's not worth it.


If you’re in the US, I would request a formal reasonable accommodation from HR with your medical evidence. This establishes a paper trail in the event they attempt to terminate you due to your medical condition. My recommendation would be to codify the expectations around response time and Slack interactions in writing as the accommodation.

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/odep/program-areas/employers/ac...

https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/fact-sheet-disability-dis...


Once you need to start worrying about paper trails, your life within the corporation will have become an utter nightmare. Sharing medical information with your employer should be an absolute last resort, which isn't where OP appears to find themselves (given that muting notifications and checking it every once in a while is on the table).


It sounds like OPs life is already an utter nightmare there. Can only go up after getting some relief.

> I can't concentrate at all. It's not like it's annoying, I simply cannot work. I have been spending 10x more energy since I started to just keep above the water but now, after 10 months, I'm simply drowning and my tickets are all piling up.

How depressing to think one shouldn't ask their employer for an accommodation for a legitimate medical condition after almost a year of suffering 8+ hours a day. More empathy please.


I would never do that. You get marked as someone who requires special accommodation. Adhd is one of those things that only come up every now and then.


Yes, but then you get special accommodation. Accommodations that, y'know, help you manage and deal with getting your work done.


I don’t think they would know how to do that.


Honest question, does this actually help? I avoid disclosing my ADHD now because others at work have either started to treat me like a drug addict, tried to help but have a ton of misconceptions about ADHD, or started to treat me like a child.

The only positive responses have been from people who have it. But it doesn’t help for workplace accommodations.


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.


> Combined with misaligned intensives to sell drugs, I'm highly sceptical of the majority of diagnoses.

ADHD and executive disfunction are under-diagnosed rather than over-diagnosed (I have so many friends who have obvious undiagnosed adhd), mostly because of parents who think like you, or the classic "it does not exist, you're just a slacker, pharma is just trying to sell you some drugs". Most physicians who diagnose you don't make any significant additional money from selling you drugs.

> It's completely possible to exhibit "ADHD" symptoms from an unhealthy work life

Or maybe OP really has severe ADHD?


> or the classic "it does not exist, you're just a slacker, pharma is just trying to sell you some drugs"

I don't think it doesn't exist, I think it's not a useful label. Partly due to the way it's treated as a long term issue that should be addressed with drug use, and partly because it can often be unhelpful to the individual's own psychological state, some people flip into an "i'm broken" mode and stay hidden behind it rather than make progress.

There is however good reason to believe in over diagnosis. ADHD is considered a neurological disorder due to physiological differences in the brain. However it's diagnosed through observation of a combination of individually non-unique behavioural symptoms... which is why when you are suspected of ADHD, you are sent to a psychiatrist.

Regardless of whether the cause of such behaviour is physiological or purely environmental, in both cases environmental factors can have a huge impact on how it affects you, this is pretty obvious for anyone who has been in the presence of someone severely autistic. Drugs are not the answer to everything, and not usually a healthy long term solution.


> it's treated as a long term issue that can only be addressed with drug use.

But that's what it is? Drugs aren't the only treatment, but they are by far the most effective.


> but they are by far the most effective.

That depends on how efficacy is measured.

Drugs appear the most effective because they can substantially change behaviour in the short term (for better and worse), they are fast. But it's not necessarily stable, and it's only cost is not monetary. Psychology is transient, even when there are underlying physiological components, and although slow to effect, consistent changes to daily routine and environment can result in a more stable outcome. But it also takes effort, analysis and consideration, drugs are easy.

There is a place for both. There are people like me who are over cautious of drug use, and sometimes they are in a position where their mental state is so messed up that it really makes sense in the short term to medicate, but it should be short term.

[edit]

To make this more tangible... consider my original suggestion. ADHD symptoms, whatever the underlying cause, will be triggered by attention sapping activities, like being subjected to Slack every minute of your working day. Turning it off for long periods will help regardless. Also having the mindset of "my environment is broken" rather than "I am broken" is far more positive and healthy, it's also more realistic, because frankly, we are all broken in different ways and need to either find the right environment for us, or change it.


They are effective at first, and then you become tolerant and either need to increase your dosage for the same effect, or take a break (which can be difficult to suffer through because now you're operating at less than baseline functioning until homeostasis kicks in, which can take a week or longer). And e.g. Adderall was only released in 1996, so there hasn't been much time to study the long-term effects.

This happens with most drugs, not just for ADHD. Even caffeine (another kind of CNS stimulant, but less potent). Remember your first cup of coffee, how nice and awake you felt after you drank it?

Please don't take this the wrong way, btw. This is coming from someone who was also diagnosed with ADHD but stopped taking the meds because I didn't think they were worth it in the long term. I just drink coffee and take occasional week-long coffee breaks now. But everyone's different and I'm sure these drugs are an absolute necessity for some people, despite the risks.


That hasn't been the case for me, and I've been taking the medications for a while now. I don't drink coffee or any kind of caffeine so I can't compare, but while the effect of the medication did reduce slightly after a while, I certainly haven't become noticed tolerance to the extent that the medication doesn't work any more. On the contrary I'm significantly better off since I started taking them. Perhaps some are more susceptible to developing a tolerance?


Another reason it is under-diagnosed is because what it takes to get diagnosed. One of my children has ADHD (got it from me) and to get it officially diagnosed so it would be accepted by school and such required testing that cost >$3k. Costing that much it is not surprising it is under-diagnosed.


OP's post strongly implies that they were diagnosed with ADHD long before the issues with Slack.


> 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


Lol. Self plug without the disclaimer. Shame.


I'm not thrilled with the plug but he makes sense. It's good advice.


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 gotta make sure that email notification is turned off or you're gonna be back in notification hell.


Well, duh. The fundamental issue is the lack of an on-call person who receives all of the notifications and isn't expected to also 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.


I have it set to "Nothing" but whenever I have the window open, I can see the orange notification conter popping up on several channels (even if I mute them).

I tried leaving channels but I get invited back whenever people tag my team, so I gave up and muted all of them (but still get the notification counter, which makes muting useless for me).

EDIT: Whenever someone tags my team, the little Slack icon on the tray bar goes red... and I don't know if that's a direct message (usually important) or someone tagging my team just "fyi". I have to check it always.


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.




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