We've experienced the same problem and spoken with others that have as well so we have been working on a solution. We think Slack delivers on it's promise to f

We've experienced the same problem and spoken with others that have as well so we have been working on a solution. We think Slack delivers on it's promise to free you from corporate email, but now we need to be freed from Slack. Slack has an extensive set of options for managing notifications but they are channel-centric and not topic centric. You either disable notifications for a channel and receive nothing or you enable them and get notified of everything. We want to be notified of things we care about wherever they happen, whether we are a member of the channel or not. And we don't want to spend any time managing notification settings. To solve this we've built a bot[0] that will let you subscribe to whatever keywords you want and will then notify you whenever those keywords are mentioned in any public channel (even if you are not a member). We've found that it has already helped us regain some of our sanity while not missing important conversations in slack. Our high-level goal is to build tools that liberate us from the information overload that seems inevitable in the modern digital age. Focus is just one small step in that direction but we wanted to get feedback early and often, so please, check it out and let us know what you think! 0: http://www.focusforslack.com/ http://www.focusforslack.com/