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>I have learned to be productive when I have a quiet space and can tinker on a problem without getting interrupted. Slack makes this very difficult [...] My ult

by jasode 8y ago

>I have learned to be productive when I have a quiet space and can tinker on a problem without getting interrupted. Slack makes this very difficult [...] My ultimate goal is to get longer stretches of uninterrupted time to work on features, customer support or operational issues. A question for HN for a hypothetical feature: What if the Slack client app had "ambient awareness" such that it suppressed notifications when the active window with focus is an IDE like MS Visual Studio, JetBrains, Xcode, emacs, etc. Would that help you? Basically, it would work similar to Slack's "Do Not Disturb" feature[1]. DND could be expanded beyond "hours" to include a list of apps that shouldn't be interrupted. Once a programmer switches away from the code IDE to the email program, that's the point the Slack chat notifications would appear. The idea is that programmers already sort of interrupt themselves[2] but since that timing is controlled by the programmer, a Slack notification is less stressful. Thoughts? >Since work never happens in a vacuum, I would be happy to have only a single realtime notification tool (OpsGenie/PagerDuty) that sends notifications to poeple currently on-call, and only about problems that require realtime attention. I don't use chat apps at work these days but when I did, I put AOL AIM, Yahoo Messenger, etc inside of a virtual machine that was minimized on screen. That way, everybody saw that I was "online" but their notifications were blocked behind the vm instead of making it to my desktop's taskbar. The vm acted like a firewall. I could then look at chat messages on my own schedule at my leisure -- typically once or twice and hour. For workplaces that expect you to reply to chat messages in 5 seconds, this hack won't work. [1] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=slack+do+not+disturb https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=slack+do+not+di... [2] https://xkcd.com/303/ https://xkcd.com/303/

beberlei 8y ago
That is something I always wished Slack had. Enable DND mode and then when you return from it, a way to review a summary of everything what happened. But individual chat messages are hard to aggregate for such a summary.
ishan_chhabra 8y ago
I really like the idea around "ambient awareness". I'll look into it. Currently, I've built a slack bot for personal use that integrates with my calendar where I can create stretches of times as "Focus" events and during that time, the bot helps me establish an async communication model. The bot sets my status to "Do Not Disturb" during the event and if somebody tries to message me, they get a message that I am in heads down mode. They can then leave a note on why they were contacting me or if I they need me urgently, they can click a button and I get an immediate notification. When my focus time ends, I get a list of notes from my team on why they needed me and I can answer them one by one. Effectively, I've found that once a team moves to Slack, all internal communication moves to Slack (instead of using slack for urgent sync and email for other async), and this brings back email like async model to Slack for the times when you need it. You can try out the slack bot at https://slack.com/apps/A5MJB641F-oliv https://slack.com/apps/A5MJB641F-oliv In full disclosure, I've build the bot for my personal usage and don't intend to monetize it. It's just my way of giving back to the community. It's not very polished and doesn't have an onboarding flow, so if you need any help in using it, contact me at ishan.chhabra [at] gmail.com. I'll be happy to help.

by jasode 8y ago

beberlei 8y ago

That is something I always wished Slack had. Enable DND mode and then when you return from it, a way to review a summary of everything what happened. But individual chat messages are hard to aggregate for such a summary.

ishan_chhabra 8y ago

I really like the idea around "ambient awareness". I'll look into it. Currently, I've built a slack bot for personal use that integrates with my calendar where I can create stretches of times as "Focus" events and during that time, the bot helps me establish an async communication model. The bot sets my status to "Do Not Disturb" during the event and if somebody tries to message me, they get a message that I am in heads down mode. They can then leave a note on why they were contacting me or if I they need me urgently, they can click a button and I get an immediate notification. When my focus time ends, I get a list of notes from my team on why they needed me and I can answer them one by one. Effectively, I've found that once a team moves to Slack, all internal communication moves to Slack (instead of using slack for urgent sync and email for other async), and this brings back email like async model to Slack for the times when you need it. You can try out the slack bot at https://slack.com/apps/A5MJB641F-oliv https://slack.com/apps/A5MJB641F-oliv In full disclosure, I've build the bot for my personal usage and don't intend to monetize it. It's just my way of giving back to the community. It's not very polished and doesn't have an onboarding flow, so if you need any help in using it, contact me at ishan.chhabra [at] gmail.com. I'll be happy to help.