Regardless of how you do things, you're going to need to find a way to manage distraction. Personally I'm an engineer turned CTO who used to spend 95% of my ti

Regardless of how you do things, you're going to need to find a way to manage distraction. Personally I'm an engineer turned CTO who used to spend 95% of my time writing code, and now spends 75% of my time on management and "soft" tasks, so I can directly relate to both sides of PG's famous Maker's vs Manager's Schedule. Every employee is going to need different amounts of space to do their job, both due to the role and also because of personality. While Slack can destroy focus, it actually has less potential to distract you then the people in your office (whether that be colleagues, co-working space people, or roommates/family at home). In all cases there need to be boundaries and reasonable expectations, and there is no way to set those without some dialogue and empathy happening. Now, full disclosure, my team is distributed between SF and London with a long tail of employees spread in a dozen other countries, so something like Slack is essential to fill in for certain face-to-face communications. But even setting distributed teams aside, Slack has some of the best notification controls in the comm tools space. The granularity of the notifications and the configuration options to show/hide/notify different channels and groups give you an amount of control which no other tool I've seen affords. You definitely have to dig into the Advanced and Channel Prefs in order to really dial this in. I also use the Mentions tab, and use of Stars on Channels, People and Messages to augment its async capabilities while still staying remarkably available to help where I'm needed. Of course this is far from a silver bullet and non-trivial to set up, but going back to email would be unthinkable at this stage. I have pretty sophisticated methods of avoiding distraction in email too, but it is infinitely augmented by telling my team: "if the sky is falling DM me on Slack". That way anyone on my team can get ahold of me at any time, and I don't have to worry about a bomb in my email inbox. The problem with email is that literally anyone in the world can email you at any time, and everyone uses email in their own way, so there is no space to come to a common understanding of how to use email. The only way to win at email is to define on your own terms how you will use it to make yourself the most productive and not letting others' expectations drive your relationship to email. One of the reasons Slack is able to "replace" email is because it gives a team a private space to set up their own social norms that is isolated from strangers and other companies who really shouldn't have a say in your priorities and time management.