For unintentional sound distractions, I've found that Bose's active noise-cancelling headphones work pretty well. (They also reduce noise-fatigue when flying.)

For unintentional sound distractions, I've found that Bose's active noise-cancelling headphones work pretty well. (They also reduce noise-fatigue when flying.) Not cheap, but worthwhile. For many other distractions, including my own generally poor focus: I got tested and treated for ADD (after a stupidly long delay). Properly treating my ADD made a night-and-day difference for my ability to tune out most distractions, and recover from the rest. I'm pretty bummed out that it took me so long to get around to dealing with it; I wasted a lot of my early-career potential because of that. For my case of ADD, each of the following helps: (1) A good night of sleep, (2) lots of caffeine, (3) Vyvance, and (4) generic Adderall. Even under the care of a physician, one needs to be careful using something like Adderall: it can lead to over-focusing, resulting in staying on a particular task longer than makes sense. For intentional distractions: skype, email, etc.: I made a conscious choice that I was okay with not responding to everyone right away. At first that felt rude, but once everyone's expectations regarding my response times were adjusted, it proved to be a net win. For Slack specifically: (1) I turned off audio notifications on the channels, and (2) If someone really needs to talk to me urgently, they can start a Slack voice call. I don't ignore those. Another solution is to have a team-wide discussion about people sometimes needing to concentrate, and how everyone will let that happen. If you have a well-functioning team where people care about each other, they should be able to hammer out the details. Any such team-wide agreement should also account for differences in how people are wired: - Persons with poor social awareness might require the "I'm busy" signalling to be something they can clearly recognize. I suspect that in most cases, these people want very much to be respectful, but just don't recognize all of the subtle social cues that people have to say, "I'm busy; please don't get my attention." - Persons who don't perform highly detailed work (especially salespeople, in my experience) tend to have noisy conversations in locations where people need to concentrate. I don't know if it's lack of awareness, or lack of empathy to the frustrations this can cause. But these people must be helped to understand the cost of breaking the concentration of people doing highly detailed work.