When I want to focus, I pause slack notifications. Slack provide a way to still send it, but in my workplace people tend to respect that setting unless it is a real emergency.
Whenever I hear about somebody's hellish Slack culture at their workplace and they blame Slack I always think, "That sounds like a bad office culture that would be bad even if Slack was removed from the equation."
To some extent that's true. But tools have their own culture as well. I've loved email for 30+ years because the culture is inherently async. I'll reply when I get to it, which might be tomorrow.
Slack builds a culture of hyper-immediate distraction which seems difficult to avoid.
Yeah, admittedly, this is very true. Any tool encourages some behaviors and discourages others.
I've loved email for 30+ years
Email feels like a firehose to me. I can't get any value from it these days. 100's of emails per day of notifications and such.
With effort it can be tamed. Filters and so on. But I've never gotten to a great place with it in modern times. With new sources of crap pouring into my inbox every day it is, at best, something that can be tamed but requires constant attention and maintenance.
Of course, this is all subjective and personal. It's working for you! Kudos. =)
Beauty of email is that it can be done because it's all open protocols.
I've been dragged into a signal channel and that's one untamable firehose. Sequential stream of messages via proprietary UI so there is nothing I can do to automatically file messaged into various folders. Nothing I can do to auto-process certain messages, nothing I can do to mark some things read and some unread, etc..
Email allows for infinite flexibility in configuring it just how you need to work best.
If you have just one inbox and everything lands there all the time, I can see how that's a firehose that's not going to be pleasant. But with email the tools exist to customize this away.
