[Jade_Jet]

I'm also in the same field and I find Slack (really chat in general) to be highly distracting. The problem isn't in chat itself, it's that people use it to post non-work related things, gifs, large scale notifications that should really only be sent to one person as a private message, etc. With email, I can filter these things out much easier. But I'm expected to be available on Slack during working hours.

[dasil003]

Keep it hidden and only reply to @messages and DMs, you can suppress @channel and @here if you want. If people are still pinging you all the time for inane things then it's sort of a human issue of the sort you might have to deal with if someone keeps coming in your office all the time to chat.