[glvn]

I would add to this, Slack can be a fantastic tool or it can be the bane of your workday, it all comes down to how your company/team use Slack.

On my team almost everything goes into the main team chat; however, every message is tagged with the person it's aimed at and any team-wide communication is tagged @here. Any sub-conversation about that top-level message happens in the message thread.

With this method, you are only notified if you are tagged in a message or if a message is tagged @here. Outside of that I will check slack about once per hour and can see all top-level issues at a glance that either my team or a specific person has been notified of. If I am interested in whatever the issue is I can dive into the thread and get more information about the issue or contribute my 0.02.

I see many here suggesting other software, at the end of the day that's all it is, software. The productivity drain/boost comes down to how everyone decides to use that software. If you get 100 emails a day with the subject "IMPORTANT: READ IMMEDIATELY", email suddenly becomes just as annoying and as much of a time-suck as Slack, this applies to all communication methods.

[deepakhj]

I mute at here in all channels. It should be banned.

[shaggyfrog]

It's easily the most misused feature of Slack.

Using @here in a channel is the equivalent of standing on your desk and shouting at everyone around you. So what happens is, like you, everyone starts muting it.

And then you just have people shouting into the void.

[projectdelphai]

I think you should rules about it at the workplace. At mine, I can probably count on one hand the amount of times I've seen an @here. And one of them, the person was told he shouldn't have done it since it wasn't important. Really makes everything think before they use it.

[about_help]

We use separate channels for different projects and people join/leave as needed. @here is incredibly useful when you have a general question and not sure who might have insight.

It all boils down to how people use the communications channel. I see @here multiple times a week but do not feel like it is a big distraction. At worst it can create a few minutes of distraction from my current workflow and if I'm truly in the middle of a thought process I ignore the message for a little bit or unless a 2nd notification hits.

[bravura]

Can you explain what you think is correct slack etiquette?

Never @ someone unless you want their immediate attention?

[kasey_junk]

This sounds like it would be a better workflow for a threaded newsgroup style application.