Your best bet might be to be less responsive on Slack — not only by not responding to everyone immediately, but by not responding to some Slack messages at all.

Your best bet might be to be less responsive on Slack — not only by not responding to everyone immediately, but by not responding to some Slack messages at all. If it's important, the person who pinged you can submit their request via another medium, hopefully in a longer form format like email or bug report that's more thoughtfully considered and thoroughly researched, and which you can reply/fix quickly without spending 10 to 30 minutes of your work day in tight synchronous communication. It's sort of a bad thing to do, but you will start getting fewer Slack messages. People have an implicit understanding of who's likely to respond in a timely manner, and somewhat ironically, it's the most responsive people who have to improve their responsiveness even more because by being responsive they'll get even more messages and interruptions. On a meta note, it continues to surprise me that more people and companies aren't talking about the highly distracting effects of the software. It works great at small scale, but if you get large enough everyone's pinging everyone all the time. I recently read Deep Work by Cal Newport (excellent book by the way [1]) and couldn't help but being mildly entertained when they get into the time draining effects of email (it seems to have been written a little before Slack caught on). The distraction engine created by Slack is the SR-71's Pratt & Whitney J58 [2] compared to email's 5 HP motor out of an everyday golf cart. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Work-Focused-Success-Distracted/dp/1455586692 https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Work-Focused-Success-Distracted/... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratt_%26_Whitney_J58 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratt_%26_Whitney_J58