[chemeril]

I agree! Slack as a utilitarian tool is perfectly fine, in my experience. Not great, but fine enough to be a value-add as a communication platform for business purposes. However, I have found the working culture supported and implicitly enforced by Slack-centered organizations to be rather traumatizing to live with in the day-to-day. The availability of instantaneous, chat-like group communication has led to an expectation of instantaneous responses and giving _anyone_ in the org interrupt priority has completely destroyed my ability to do thoughtful, considerate work. This is not a Slack problem in origin, but the use of Slack is certainly loading and pointing a handgun at actual productivity in an org that uses it heavily for business.

I'm sure that there are plenty of organizations that have found ways to use Slack effectively where it fits. I have not yet found one.

[sjburt]

I treat Slack DMs like email and respond when I have time dedicated to it. Very rarely found a situation where that was not acceptable. Adding do-not-disturb times and calendar integration helps a lot too--people can tell when you are not working, in a meeting, or in a focus mode.

The big problem with Slack is when a multi-party discussion starts about a topic and you need to make immediate input or be left out. I haven't found a fix for this, but it's really the same problem as coworkers talking in the break room, so I'm not sure if the blame can be laid at Slack-type tools.

[computerdork]

Yeah, agreed, using Slack's do-not-disturb to pause any notifications works really well. To be honest, not sure why the article doesn't mention this key (fairly obvious) feature to decrease distractions... Just looked, it was written in 2018, maybe Slack didn't have do not disturb back then??

[TheCoelacanth]

I've found it extremely limited. For example it only allows a single scheduled DND period per day. Also no way to do DND excluding a few specific people or specific channels.

[aphexddb]

This is the way