I've found that slack takes up way more time for me too. I'm usually in 50 IRC channels at once. My workflow when I open irc is to check my hilight window for

I've found that slack takes up way more time for me too. I'm usually in 50 IRC channels at once. My workflow when I open irc is to check my hilight window for pings, and then glance at the channel list for backscroll chatter in channels I follow closely (if bored, also look at chatter in other channels). I then respond to things, and switch back to the hilight window. I occasionally glance at this window to check for more pings and chatter in said channels. Each check is a quick glance, and can be done without context-switching. I am in a bunch of slack teams, but I only really care about one channel in each. It takes much longer to handle these, since I need to open a tab for each, and if I've been pinged go look for the ping. IRC sucks, but at least everything is in one place. I'd be far more productive with slack if there was a unified app for all teams with a dedicated notifications panel.