Ask HN: I have diagnosed ADHD and cannot work with Slack anymore – advice?

[throwaway91021]

10 months ago, I started to work at a company that uses Slack heavily. They have 1000+ channels and my team is tagged in a lot of stuff so I get a lot of notifications.

I can't concentrate at all. It's not like it's annoying, I simply cannot work.

I have been spending 10x more energy since I started to just keep above the water but now, after 10 months, I'm simply drowning and my tickets are all piling up.

I don't want to be that person that's not reachable but more and more, I'm thinking about closing Slack and opening it 2-3x a day.

Any advice?

[zztop44]

I don’t have ADHD but I get very distracted by Slack. Here’s what worked for me.

1. Slack app uninstalled on my phone. If I need it for something, I install it, use it, then delete again.

2. Slack app on my laptop fully closed by default.

3. Set times (about 5 a day) to check in and respond to notifications and scan channels. When I was a senior manager with lots of actually important messages these blocks were about half an hour each (for a total of about 2.5 hours a day). These days I can get away with less than 10 minutes.

4. Block these times in your calendar. At the start of the day, block out the rest of the time without meetings etc as Deep Work. People will understand you’re not easily contactable.

6. Tell your close team mates/manager that if they ever need you urgently they can contact via Signal/WhatsApp. If anyone needs you and really can’t wait a few hours then they’ll ask your manager and be able to get in touch. If you’re really worried about being uncontactable then put your phone number in your Slack bio.

Using that, I went from being totally addicted to Slack to being able to be a productive worker again. Of course your mileage may vary.

[danShumway]

This is all great advice (especially "uninstall it from your phone").

I'll add to this that if anyone involved with Slack is around here, Slack is in desperate need of more powerful/flexible muting controls -- ie, not just muting notifications from specific channels/DMs, but actually doing things like suppressing visual indicators in the sidebar, muting during certain time periods, etc... You want to go wild, it would be great to be able to fully turn off channels client-side during certain periods of the day so that new messages literally won't show up until it's turned back on.

When I used Slack, if it was open and there was an indicator for a channel, I checked that channel. It didn't matter if I got a notification or not, the indicator itself was enough to distract me.

I suspect there are a lot of people who have become less productive because of issues like this. A lot of the advice in this thread mirrors the above comment where people feel like they need to completely close the app and get it out of their face entirely in order to concentrate. In my opinion that's a weakness of the muting/UI options, that the only way to really truly tame notifications for deep work in many instances is to completely block the entire app.

Edit: I consider both of these problems faced by OP (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34018044, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34014517) to be primarily UX problems that Slack could fix. Definitely the notification indicators -- putting a bright red dot on someone's screen is a distraction regardless of whether or not you also play a sound.

[paulryanrogers]

Have you tried Slack in a browser with notifications turned off? Possibly kept in a separate browser profile, so you can quickly open and close as needed? Or even just minimized until needed.

[dangus]

This is pretty good advice. I'll add onto this:

- Your company is idiotic in how they use Slack. With what I assume is a large company (1000+ channels) teams shouldn't have to respond to mentions with the possible exception of people directly on your team. Suggest/insist that the team implement a formal request intake system and actively discourage mentions. On my SRE team, we directly told other teams that Slack was not a method to request that work be done, and that all requests via Slack would be ignored. Our public channel was for asynchronous informational questions only (and please read the docs first). If your team has an on-call obligation, it shouldn't be implemented through Slack mentions, it should be through a defined incident management process with the appropriate policies and tools designed for that job.

- Remember that you have a diagnosed condition that can be considered a disability and that your employer must by law make reasonable accommodations for it if you live in the USA. You should insist on being provided a method of work that accommodates you (and you're not even asking for anything that costs money). If you get pushback on this Slack situation, insist in writing that this is a disability issue and you are formally requesting a disability accommodation and include HR on your request. (It's true that HR is there to protect the company and not you, and in this situation that's exactly what they'll do: protect the company from an ADA lawsuit by accommodating your disability)

To be quite honest I'm not even sure your ADHD is actually the problem here. Your company sounds like a nightmare.

[incanus77]

These, or something very similar, are essential to concentration. It's just not possible otherwise. The problem is this means nothing if the work culture is an expectation of always being available. So it's not entirely a technical problem (like many work problems).

[jjav]

These are solid advice. I've also had slack utterly destroy productivity, it is very unfortunate it has become popular.

I don't have the slack app anywhere, I just access it via browser.

I don't keep a tab open on it. I'll close the tab when I'm done and only reopen it via bookmark next time I need.

I configure it to send me email if anyone mentions me. Of course, need to also make sure email notifications are all off. I'll check email about hourly or between meetings or completed tasks.

In the absence of any email notifications from slack, I'll check it only at a few set times during that day. Times vary based on org culture but ideally not more than three times a day (morning, lunch, evening).

If these technical solutions work for you, they can work great. But of course the worst part about slack is how it incentivizes this hyper-toxic culture of everyone monitoring chat all day long above all else. If your company culture has fallen into that pit and people get angry at you for not answering every bit of trivia within 30 seconds, I wish I knew of a solution other than quitting.

[tiffanyh]

This is also great advice in the event email (or anything else) that distracts you at work.

Essentially, don't process in real-time. Process in batches a few times a day.

[wojciii]

I don't have ADHD either and remember last time that I worked for a company that used that tool as something that drained me of energy with all the distractions. It's great when you want to do something and need to communicate something to your team (to read whenever they are ready) or write near real time with someone about a problem.

Chat apps should, besides a dark mode have a mute mode and distraction free mode with a way to communicate for certain individuals or groups.

Slack sucks and is probable the single source of most wasted developer hours besides open offices. :)

[testfrequency]

I do all of these things, have ADHD, and I can confirm it’s helped me preserve my sanity the last few years.

I’ve also come to terms with the fact that I most likely will never be that “hero” on my team who responds to a slack question or actions an ask right away - I just don’t have the mental bandwidth to be heads down and context switch 5 times an hour.

I also only check email twice a day

Anything you can do to be more defensive and purposeful with your time, the better

[Aeolun]

I just tell everyone that if it’s not urgent enough to call me (on my phone), it can wait.

[gingerlime]

Fantastic advice! one (optional, but highly recommended) to add:

turn off your presence/away status.

Just because you’re online does not automatically give permission to bug you. This however goes both ways. So make sure you do eventually respond to others. But there’s no expectation of replying right now.

[troebr]

Unrelated - did you go from management back to IC? Or a quieter management role.

[lowken]

I was going to give a flavor of the same advice. This is solid Slack guidance and if followed will work.

[m463]

you can also turn off notifications or tweak them by channel - you can turn off @here and @channel too.

[smileybarry]

I tweak my Slack pretty heavily to suit my ADHD but 90% of it is: turn off (desktop) notifications entirely. Not "sometimes", all of it. (I just set Windows to DND so I still get Slack's red dot) I notice the red dot as soon as it appears anyway, but the lack of bigger visuals & audio means if I'm actually focused (and don't notice the red dot) I don't get yanked out of it.

The other 10% is:

* Mute unnecessary channels

* Turn off mentions entirely for channels where they don't mean much other than "@XYZ is looking at it"

* Set mobile notifications to "only if away" (+ a work hours schedule; if it's important they can click the "notify anyway" link)

* If you're on Android: change the notification sound to something custom that's a lot more "calm" and quieter, because you notice it anyway and it won't give off the "important! DM! check now!" feeling that all of Slack's do. (I miss this on iOS)

* On really bad days (focus-wise): don't be afraid to hide or close Slack entirely to just focus. I usually just put it away in Windows' extended notification tray, so I can occasionally check it without relaunching (or appearing offline/away).

[dahdum]

I started using 4 virtual desktops to manage distractions many years ago and it’s worked wonderfully for me.

Desktop 1 is for chat, email, Spotify, and general web browsing.

Desktop 2 is for software development only, nowadays VSCode. A separate browser profile is used here and only for development related browsing (docs, stack overflow, live testing).

Desktop 3 is data and system administration. Remote terminals, Excel, database clients, and similar go here.

Desktop 4 is a catch-all. I use it for infrequent activity, like the occasional Photoshop, Word or vendor tooling.

I’ve used this same setup on Windows, OSX, and Linux for 15+ years. I always setup Alt-1,2,3,4 to switch and tweak the OS to remove all animations so it switches instantly.

I’ve found it much easier to stay in the zone this way.

[mnky9800n]

I have ADHD diagnosed. I turned off all slack notifications. In fact, I almost always turn off all notifications. My mind is my domain and I choose when others can inject into it. The reason is, my job isn't some disaster related topic (well it is because it's climate change related but that disaster doesn't happen tomorrow). So that means, if poeple really need me, they can come find me, email me, send me a message on slack, or whatever. And i will reply to it when i get it. Nobody has ever seemed to have a problem with this and everyone seems to respect that I have limits on when I want to do things because I have my own things to do.

On a related note, I noticed that many of the things I had labeled as ADHD related went away after going to therapy and realizing why I do things to please others, over achieve and stay constantly involved and on top of everything, etc. It was very easy to label that as ADHD but in fact, the motivating factors that pushed me to reply to every email immediately, reply to every slack message, like, comment, subscribe everything was related to my personal schemas and modes. Not to discredit ADHD as a contributing factor, but I suddenly found like I had control over things when I began addressing these underlying internal beliefs.

[lynchdt]

I work mostly with Engineering teams, and consider slack inbound a pathology. Slack is great for collab in places, but it’s not a strong way to manage inbound, IMO.

The teams I’m responsible for make it easy for their stakeholder to raise issues, asks in a more deliberate, calmer way e.g. via GitHub issues or manager email. In exchange, we commit to mutually agreed response times on certain categories of business critical issues.

Generally, I don’t think it takes an ADHD diagnosis for slack inbound to completely kill your productivity, it’s a general problem. I don’t have ADHD but have strong empathy for how this must be a complete nightmare for you.

Perhaps have a manager put some structure on your inbound on your behalf?

[MarathonSeeker]

It starts with a culture where I'm not sweating the fact that I haven't checked my Slack notifications in a while.

Slack is used like a kitchen sink in the two places I've used it - there is no easy way to determine what is urgent vs what can wait. One literally has to comb through all the red dots to filter them. If you believe channels solve this because you can create dedicated channels for the important stuff, very soon someone starts abusing the responsiveness on this channel to their selfish ends, first seeking an exception, and very soon making it a habit.

To top this, the Slack UX is literally designed to maximize the time one spends with it. I often find myself on Slack intending to either - 1. Check one of the important channels or 2. Recollect something someone shared that I now need to use

And before I know it, I'm responding to something that I didn't need to at this time. I often also forget why I came here in the first place.

Yes, email and ticketing are also pervaded by spam, but Slack is essentially a corporate sponsored, culturally accepted medium for noise and distraction with no easy way to apply controls.

You typically need strong leadership to define the constraints through culture, because the tool by itself isn't designed for this.

[sublinear]

I completely agree.

I am so fed up with this problem that I'm not going to mince words.

Nobody wants to be told they're disorganized and sloppy, but people outside engineering (especially sales and client people) are the absolute worst. They're the ones with the ADHD.

Engineers rarely have trouble with deep focus on work unless they're constantly being nagged by idiots who don't understand what they're costing the company.

There's a strong business case against the abuse of chat for "quick questions" or whatever other bullshit people are too dumb to figure out on their own if they just spent a few seconds more in thought before bothering anyone else.

[Tagbert]

I'm curious about what you mean by "inbound". It sounds like messages from someone "outside" but not sure if that is probably a limited definition.

[tetha]

Indeed, very much this. We spent some efforts structuring this at work and now we have 2-3 rules in place. First off, all requests for work and services are always issues either directly in the ticket system, or via mail to a central mail address. Nothing from chat will reliably trigger any work done.

However, we have defined a role "first contact". This role rotates on a weekly basis, and whoever is first contact has the job of monitoring some well-known channels for requests. They then act as a first level support pretty much, helping people to figure out how to best request what they need. They also handle mails that aren't automatically handled in the central mailbox.

The latter in turn enables the team to just ignore pretty much all chat notifications outside of the team. First contact person will ensure they are heard, and first contact person will also address high severity tickets directly to people after creation. And as much as that sounds like a slower process, it has improved our resolution times because people aren't distracted as much.

[lamontcg]

Mute lots of channels by default. Might seem pointless to still keep them in the list, but I consider those like muted bookmarks. You have to mute @channel and @here before muting the channel for some unknown reason.

Turn off @channel and @here notifications for nearly everything other than your team-specific channel that should be only your immediate coworkers and your manager. There used to be an easy way to manage these settings across all your channels in one page, but I can't find it now.

If you have some kind of team alias that people are abusing then talk to your manager about that, and possibly just disable notifications for that. If you have a ticket system, people should be using it, not pinging you on slack all the time.

You should only get notifications for DMs and direct @notifications and @here only for your team channel. If you have a team channel for support people wanting support should post questions there without @here'ing or @person'ing questions. And you should be able to hide that and not answer questions for 30-60 minutes while you're off focusing on something else.

A lot of managing slack is just aggressively ignoring shit because you can't possibly have your finger on the pulse of literally every conversation in slack while getting your other work done. You have to rely on the fact that if it is truly important that you need to be involved in a conversation that you'll get dragged into that conversation later. If you're working somewhere that it doesn't work that way, and you find people bypassing you for things you should be involved in, then find another job.

Definitely keep slack off your phone or at least keep your work slack off your phone.

[nikau]

This is sage advice - I think of slack like the bystander effect - if nobody is explicitly asking you to do something you aren't accountable, but you can help out if you feel like it when it suits you.

If they want a formal response SLA they can use an appropriate tool like service now and its overheads.

[rqmedes]

Not related to slack, but managing your ADHD symptoms.

Look into a low oxalate diet, it really helped me and my children.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21911305/

https://www.greatplainslaboratory.com/articles-1/2015/11/13/...

https://korunutrition.com/autism-low-oxalate-diet/

https://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/vegetarianism-and...

[loxias]

Interesting links, thanks!

(in case it helps anyone else...) About half a year ago I discovered that a brutally low carb diet -- leading to being in ketosis -- drastically helped my ADHD as well as other mental health things I've struggled with for my entire life. I wish I knew earlier!

[SpeedilyDamage]

Please don't give advice like this on the Internet; you are not a qualified physician, you do not know what this person's life actually is, what medicines they're currently taking, what allergies they have, etc.

You could literally kill someone with the wrong "benign" advice at the wrong time. Turning off Slack won't kill anyone (probably) but suggesting a diet or medication very well could.

Just don't do it.

[tdeck]

All of these links are about autism, not ADHD. Am I missing something?

[jasonhansel]

OP didn't ask for advice about how to treat their condition. Presumably they prefer to hear that from their doctor, rather than from every stranger they mention their diagnosis to.

[s1k3]

Step 1 - turn off all notifications, noise and badges. This will allow you to not be disturbed by interruptions.

Step 2 - if step 1 doesn’t work then shut slack down while working. Being reachable 100% of the time is insane. And the barrier for bugging is super low with Slack.

Step 3 - if 2,3 don’t work then use something like dispatch.do to prioritize all the junk and filter out all the noise.

Step 4 - it’s a you problem. Find a new job or seek professional help.

[userbinator]

Ask your company to consider using Microsoft Teams instead. It's so repulsive that you and everyone else will probably be far less willing to communicate at all.

Only half-joking.

[sf4lifer]

I ran into this issue at a large corp. I was a subject matter expert on how a certain product worked so literally would get 500+ notifications daily from (mostly sales) people asking the same questions. I set an auto-reply to anyone that mentioned me that included a link to FAQ and directed them to SEs or CS folks who were responsible for answering these sort of questions. I also linked a recording to the last webinar where I went over what's new and answered questions and a link to the next upcoming one. In the auto-response I set the expectation that a response from could take up to 5 days. This more or less solved that issue.

As for my own channel surfing to avoid working. That's a WIP. Best advice I can give is to maintain a task list. When you catch yourself surfing, go to the task list and see if there is something you can knock off.

[theGnuMe]

The first person to write a chatgpt slack bot called Anton that reads all of your local corp docs will make a mint (with security controls)

Free idea folks.

[jimmywetnips]

That's an excellent solution. I think part of it is also being comfortable and firm and not teaching others that "Hey he's the go to guy and he answers questions immediately and is super helpful". Eventually the problem sorts itself out. And even if it doesn't, so what, you're one person. There are limits and real costs to being a human operating switchboard.

[vegancap]

I have ADHD and have found Slack to be a massive distraction. I haven't fully solved the issue, but explaining to your manager 'look, I can't always be available on Slack, I need to block time off in my calendar where I have Slack closed' - to any reasonable manager, that should be absolutely fine. Set your status to something like 'distraction free mode' and just close it for a few hours.

You might feel a sense of separation anxiety doing this initially, but you get used to it, especially when you realise you're almost never missing anything important by doing this. Start small perhaps, block off an hour a day for a week, then next week block off two hour periods. Eventually, try to block off certain mornings or afternoons. Try to keep the times you do this consistent so other folks in your team know/expect it. Just be honest about it and step away from it, if they're a decent place to work, they'll understand and encourage it. If they don't and expect you to be 100% available all the time, then they're both ridiculous and not a good place for folks who are neurodivergent, which is a bit of a red flag

[TrevorJ]

Here's what I have found helps:

1. Mute any channel that you don't absolutely need to have active.

2. Use the slack-calendar integration if it's available for whatever calendar solution your team uses.

3. Add meetings in your calendar for yourself for doing work. Many people at my company will label these as "focus time", "Heads down on project work" or the like.

Depending on the slack integration, it will show that you are in a meeting. If not you can set your status to something like suggested above, and you can mute your notifications for the duration.

I'll often additionally let the people I work closest with know how they can get hold of me if something is truly urgent "Hey, I go super heads down on project work from 12-5 most days, if something super urgent comes up you can call me at ###-####".

[danwee]

> I don't want to be that person that's not reachable but more and more, I'm thinking about closing Slack and opening it 2-3x a day.

What's wrong with that? That's how many people work with Slack (myself included). I don't answer whenever someone asks me something; I answer in a specific allocated timeslot during the day (2 to be precise: the very first thing in the morning, and 2h before finishing my day)

[seabrookmx]

+1

And if you're in a role where you are expected to respond promptly (say, you're an SRE or sysadmin that's on-call) there should be other, better avenues to reach out like a ticketing system, pagerduty or opsgenie, etc.

[junon]

To be honest, this isn't an ADD thing. This is poor management. Don't think you're an outlier here, I'd be shocked if anyone was getting anything done.

First, uninstall work comms from your phone and from personal devices (unless explicitly mandatory of course).

Second, mute all channels except the ones you actually need notifications for. Mentions will still show bubbles and can still show notifications but messages that are irrelevant will not.

Put a permanent slack status that reads something like "Ping me if you need me, otherwise I probably won't see it!" with a :warning: emoji as the icon.

Finally, if you're still getting too many notifications, talk to your manager about the productivity and distractions problem. Do not make it about your ADD. It won't matter to them in the typical case, and doesn't actually signal to them it's a problem they can solve. Instead, speak about it in the context of a team distraction. I guarantee you with that many channels, you're definitely not the only one thinking this.

Just a tip about the muting: You can manage the channel categories in slack, putting most of the channels into their own category, and then muting the entire category by right clicking on the category title.

[nashashmi]

I have had adhd and autism. Thought it was a birth trait. But adulthood happened and i had been getting away more and more from those symptoms.

Now it’s coming back. And I realized it has a lot to do with parenting incorrectly.

Let’s just say looking back, there is nothing you can do to adjust to a moving train with adhd. So start reducing your role. Shrink a bit. Be less manager. and be more managed if that helps. And start communicating loudly about what makes slack difficult. Very loudly. People will realize who you are without realizing you have adhd. And will adjust to how you work.

So figure out how many things you can track at any one time. My max is five. So reduce your inputs to just those items. And designate one of them for colleagues.

[brundolf]

I often close Slack when I need to focus on something. And I'll spend hours of the day with my phone on do-not-disturb

If you're needing to be urgently-reached multiple times a day, there's something seriously wrong at your company. Almost any message should be able to wait a few hours

You mention "tickets piling up", which sounds like it goes beyond Slack. If these are actual tasks piling up faster than you can complete them, that's a whole separate problem with the company and has nothing to do with you or your adhd

If the company does have systemic issues that are making it hard to function on the job, I'd suggest looking elsewhere. Or at least talking about it with your manager

[sacnoradhq]

This isn't your problem, it's the company's inefficient use of attention. Spamming and interrupting everyone with notifications and expecting everyone to read everything is a terrible model.

0. They need to rotate an "on-call" person who isn't necessarily expected to output work, but instead absorb and triage all the inbound requests.

1. It's rude to directly message someone on a team without a specific, recent context.

2. If an issue is serious enough, then the on-call person can pull in others.

Companies can diverge from this model at their own peril.

[jonasdegendt]

Make checking your messages part of your routine, as opposed to an interruption of said routine. More concretely, set certain time windows of your day, be it hourly or every 4 hours, where you check Slack and reply to relevant messages, after which you drop it again until the next window.

Turn off all Slack notifications (or close out of it all together) and set daily and repeating calendar events that say “check Slack” to pop up instead. That’s how I’ve setup all kinds of reoccurring but otherwise distracting tasks and it works great.

[pfoof]

> They have 1000+ channels

What a time to be alive

First of all, talk to your manager. Ask for a trial that you will use Slack just 2-3x a day as you described and otherwise you want to be contacted via e-mail/Jira/etc. If there's something big and important but not urgent (like "production down we are bankrupt"), ask to forward it to you via e-mail.

> I'm simply drowning and my tickets are all piling up.

That's where your pace increases and you will show improvement thus you will be allowed to continue like that.

[jupp0r]

I don't have (diagnosed) ADHD, but this keeps me sane:

1. mute all @here or @channel notifications. Those are almost never critical. If somebody needs you to do something, they'll DM you.

2. pick a handful of channels that are important and mute all others (in that they don't show up as having unread messages). Those are the channels that you'll want to read all messages in.

3. Block 1-3 daily calendar entries with 15 minutes in them in your calendar for Slack time. This is the time where you will read the messages from 2. and respond. Feel free to extend the time blocks if you need to if it's up and you aren't done. You'll look at channels in 2. outside of these time blocks.

4. If there is something urgent going on (ie production outage), you'll deviate from this and that's fine.