Hello,
Because of work, I use Slack all day every day. Since probably day 1 I have disabled sounds and alerts/banners. However, I still have the badge icon in the Dock to know once my intention is required. I hide the Dock and every few minutes reveal it to see if the count has changed. It’s driving me nuts, especially since there is a culture of urgency in my company, which is the opposite of focus.
My post is a bit vague but basically I wonder how people “tame” their Slack experience. Would it be helpful to use Slack in the browser instead? And yeah, I have to keep the “green light”…
Sounds like you’re doing the right things. The “culture of urgency” you mention is the real culprit.
If you aren’t free to do focused, sustained blocks of work because coworkers get to set your priorities via interruptions, I’d suggest bringing that up (with a proposed solution) to your manager.
If “that’s just the way it is” at your company, I’m sorry. That’s a difficult way to have to work.
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Agreed @Jezmund_Berserker,
For me, that conversation should be about Urgent v Important & Urgent. Anything which is Important and Urgent should be a drop now event, anything else can wait a few hours.
If your work requires you to focus and/or meet deadlines then you should be able to disconnect for a couple of hours a day.
I work from home, and every day, I quit teams and set outlook to Offline so that I can work uninterrupted on my most focused work. My direct reports and my boss have my Mobile Phone Number if they need to get hold of me for something urgent AND important during those two hours.
If your company won’t allow you to implement reasonable conditions to get the best out of you then you have to wonder if you’re in the right place.
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Maybe there should be a Slack Channel at your company or team for drop dead items which everyone is in, so anyone who is able can help. Then you could only allow that channel for the dock badge.
I still use Marco’s old app “quitter” to silently close Outlook (and eventually Slack) after a few minutes. It’s amazing how powerful it is to just have them closed when you’re in a “flow state” of work.
But, IMO, it has to be reinforced with culture and expectations. In our company, we constantly talk about the importance of undisturbed work, we teach all new employees (and regularly reinforce) the difference between urgent and important+, and we put a few hurdles and practices in place to try and support those concepts. It’s hard - especially with great coworkers who always want to help (and thus be available) to their team. But, with persistence and company-wide clarity about the expectation, we’re doing okay.
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I use the app on a second screen. I put the upfront work into Slack so it only notifies me if it’s likely something I should look at. Lots of groups with their own notification settings, many muted. Keep redirecting project work to channels so DMs stay personal/not-urgent.
We also have a communication policy of how often we should monitor Slack messages (one hour) which gets a few people to be more attentive, but gives a larger number of people permission to not constantly pay attention. Paired with this is the reminder that Basecamp is the place for communications that don’ t require attention soon. As Geoff and Paul have said, ultimately, it’s cultural. If it’s impossible to have the “how much focus time should this company allow us?” conversation, hopefully you can at least talk to a few people about helping each other in this area.
I’ve also accepted there are periods where I should be doing reactive and/or people work; in those times, I stop trying to shoehorn in other projects and just focus on the chats/huddles/Zooms. I usually open the key channels/DMs in new windows for this mode (and get a snack and coffee.)
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