At my company, we use WhatsApp alongside Slack. It's primarily for legacy reasons, but we're seeing actually a really interesting phenomenon: because WhatsApp e

At my company, we use WhatsApp alongside Slack. It's primarily for legacy reasons, but we're seeing actually a really interesting phenomenon: because WhatsApp exists as a way to ping someone with an emergency request that should disrupt their flow, we can have a culture where direct messages and mentions in Slack should be answered reasonably promptly but not immediately, and should not disrupt bandwidth. So Slack, even with little red icons appearing, becomes a safe haven for creative thought, and operational craziness can be isolated elsewhere. I wonder how many more productivity and sanity points society would have gained in the past few years if Slack had built in an @@ or @! symbol for a "SuperPing" that's differentiated from a normal ping (five knocks after the brush, perhaps?). Or even provide a structured way to set a priority on a mention, letting you reference that someone was involved in a thing you're writing about or that they should see it as an FYI, but make it clear that they don't need to worry about it immediately. You can make the UI have sane defaults so it's not overwhelming, then you either let culture sort itself out if people are misusing the system, or otherwise ensure there are speed-bumps to misuse. It's ironic that even YouTube streamers benefit from being able to triage Superchats, with color coding based on the monetary value the sender ascribes to getting the streamer's immediate attention. Why is donation-based entertainment more sane than the business environment? At the end of the day, humans don't work well when they're "always on." There's a balance between UI simplicity and the fundamental UX principal that not everything can be important. I do wonder if there's research on how many classes of things people can handle on a screen - rather than a binary classification between mentions and non-mentions, is there anything preventing us from handling a third priority level?