[Tagbert]

We use slack but there is no expectation that someone will respond after hours. Your time is your time. If you’re in a meeting or just working on something, I don’t expect you to respond. I’m just dropping a message to you. Respond when you have some free time. If we are both free and can chat interactively that great and we can resolve this right away.

If you are currently on-call, I would expect that you check for slack messages on a regular basis.

BTW I don’t have any notifications turned on for Slack. I periodically check for new message flags. For most channels, I keep them on mute unless it is a channel that I am personally active in.

I treat email the same way. Not notifications. It drives me crazed when I’m talking to someone at their desk and they are constantly getting pop ups telling that they got an email or a slack message. Stop that shit! Get it under control. Push back.

[pacifika]

Because people can respond to Slack messages immediately it enforces the expectation of quick back and forth dialogue, and anxiety on the part of those who want focus time and mute their channels and notifications. This is why it's more like IRC and less like a forum.

When I quit Slack I still feel the expectation of others at work for me to respond to messages in a timely manner and thus feel I have to check Slack periodically. This then enforces the implied importance of Slack in the workplace. Considering this, perhaps people do not love Slack but rather feel subject to it.

I wish Slack would have the option on a slack to make UI changes to make it a bit harder to post, and encourage full thoughts over quick one liners. In the meantime, we can try and reject writing quick responses ourselves.

In another Slack with a group of friends, there is no expectation to respond and therefore there is not the anxiety.

[wilkystyle]

This is a very good approach. I have become ruthless at removing inbound interruptions from my devices:

I have all notification pop-ups disabled across all of my devices, with the sole exception of an incoming phone call (unless the caller is not in my contacts list, in which case it goes straight to voicemail without ringing my phone).

Beyond notifications, all badges are also disabled across all devices, with the sole exception of text messages (if I unlock my phone and go to the home screen, I can see that I have unread text messages).

This enables me to live largely in a pull fashion, without every communication channel constantly breaking my flow.