Ask HN: I have diagnosed ADHD and cannot work with Slack anymore – advice?

1000+ channels sounds insane. Maybe it's normal to use Slack like that in larger enterprises, but IMO at that kind of scale they need to have separate Slack workspaces for each team, and then higher level ones (or a different method of communication) for higher-level strategic & executive planning. Even if you're not expected to be in the vast majority of them, having 1000+ Slack channels all under one workspace would be overwhelming for a lot of people, I'd think.

For the OP trying to manage that situation, I'd say leave or mute any channel you don't need to be in, set it to only notify you for @ mentions. (@channel mentions would depend whether it's abused; if not, those could be included too. If it is, then probably best not to notify on those.) And then yeah, as you suggested, aside from people specifically tagging or DMing you, only look a couple times a day, at specific times.

If you think that could cause inconvenience for others, or if even just the @mentions are too much, it could be worth bringing it up with your manager too. (If you've got a good manager, probably worth bringing it up regardless.) Try to approach it not as a complaint, nor as something you can't handle, but just a challenge to be solved, like any of the many engineering challenges you work through every day. Along the lines of, "Hey, I was wondering if I could run something by you. I've noticed that with all the Slack channels we're in, I'm getting pinged pretty regularly. I want to make sure I'm available when people need me, but I also find it helpful if I can have uninterrupted stretches to concentrate on coding. Was thinking a decent solution might be ______. What do you think?" Of course you know your manager better than I do, so obviously tailor it to how you'd normally communicate with them. Personally though, I always appreciate it when someone on my team comes to me with an issue in that way, as an opportunity for improvement. They might even have some useful ideas, or be able to help facilitate.

I don’t have ADHD but I get very distracted by Slack. Here’s what worked for me.

1. Slack app uninstalled on my phone. If I need it for something, I install it, use it, then delete again.

2. Slack app on my laptop fully closed by default.

3. Set times (about 5 a day) to check in and respond to notifications and scan channels. When I was a senior manager with lots of actually important messages these blocks were about half an hour each (for a total of about 2.5 hours a day). These days I can get away with less than 10 minutes.

4. Block these times in your calendar. At the start of the day, block out the rest of the time without meetings etc as Deep Work. People will understand you’re not easily contactable.

6. Tell your close team mates/manager that if they ever need you urgently they can contact via Signal/WhatsApp. If anyone needs you and really can’t wait a few hours then they’ll ask your manager and be able to get in touch. If you’re really worried about being uncontactable then put your phone number in your Slack bio.

Using that, I went from being totally addicted to Slack to being able to be a productive worker again. Of course your mileage may vary.

This is all great advice (especially "uninstall it from your phone").

I'll add to this that if anyone involved with Slack is around here, Slack is in desperate need of more powerful/flexible muting controls -- ie, not just muting notifications from specific channels/DMs, but actually doing things like suppressing visual indicators in the sidebar, muting during certain time periods, etc... You want to go wild, it would be great to be able to fully turn off channels client-side during certain periods of the day so that new messages literally won't show up until it's turned back on.

When I used Slack, if it was open and there was an indicator for a channel, I checked that channel. It didn't matter if I got a notification or not, the indicator itself was enough to distract me.

I suspect there are a lot of people who have become less productive because of issues like this. A lot of the advice in this thread mirrors the above comment where people feel like they need to completely close the app and get it out of their face entirely in order to concentrate. In my opinion that's a weakness of the muting/UI options, that the only way to really truly tame notifications for deep work in many instances is to completely block the entire app.

Edit: I consider both of these problems faced by OP (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34018044, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34014517) to be primarily UX problems that Slack could fix. Definitely the notification indicators -- putting a bright red dot on someone's screen is a distraction regardless of whether or not you also play a sound.

These are solid advice. I've also had slack utterly destroy productivity, it is very unfortunate it has become popular.

I don't have the slack app anywhere, I just access it via browser.

I don't keep a tab open on it. I'll close the tab when I'm done and only reopen it via bookmark next time I need.

I configure it to send me email if anyone mentions me. Of course, need to also make sure email notifications are all off. I'll check email about hourly or between meetings or completed tasks.

In the absence of any email notifications from slack, I'll check it only at a few set times during that day. Times vary based on org culture but ideally not more than three times a day (morning, lunch, evening).

If these technical solutions work for you, they can work great. But of course the worst part about slack is how it incentivizes this hyper-toxic culture of everyone monitoring chat all day long above all else. If your company culture has fallen into that pit and people get angry at you for not answering every bit of trivia within 30 seconds, I wish I knew of a solution other than quitting.

These, or something very similar, are essential to concentration. It's just not possible otherwise. The problem is this means nothing if the work culture is an expectation of always being available. So it's not entirely a technical problem (like many work problems).

Have you tried Slack in a browser with notifications turned off? Possibly kept in a separate browser profile, so you can quickly open and close as needed? Or even just minimized until needed.

Slack in browser with notifications off, and not at all on the phone (or disabled while not on call) is the only sane way. I will still go to check it quite a few times per day, but I would never survive if the thing is allowed to actively call my attention.

This is the way. I particularly like browser based apps. No concept of hiding out minimized when I close a tab. It's just gone until I decide to open it up again.

I still get distracted when the tab text or icon changes.

That's why you close the tab between visits :)

It's incredible that this isn't the official recommended way to use slack in a large organization. It shouldn't even ask to issue notifications if there will be a ridiculous frequency of them. Organizations will eventually not purchase a service if that service destroys productivity.

Yeah this is definitely a good idea but I think personally I need the structure of having specific set times to check it, as opposed to it just always being an option whenever I encounter a boring or difficult task.

I tried this myself years ago and my previous boss complained because my status was not showing up as online. This was well before 2020 when remote work was not as common as it is now, so I'm still a little annoyed by that. Also open offices, they're the physical version of Slack.

This is also great advice in the event email (or anything else) that distracts you at work.

Essentially, don't process in real-time. Process in batches a few times a day.

I just tell everyone that if it’s not urgent enough to call me (on my phone), it can wait.

Unrelated - did you go from management back to IC? Or a quieter management role.

I started a small agency and do consulting. So now I’m a guest in various different project channels across several client Slack teams + manage my own contractors etc. Much quieter :)

you can also turn off notifications or tweak them by channel - you can turn off @here and @channel too.

I was going to give a flavor of the same advice. This is solid Slack guidance and if followed will work.

This is pretty good advice. I'll add onto this:

- Your company is idiotic in how they use Slack. With what I assume is a large company (1000+ channels) teams shouldn't have to respond to mentions with the possible exception of people directly on your team. Suggest/insist that the team implement a formal request intake system and actively discourage mentions. On my SRE team, we directly told other teams that Slack was not a method to request that work be done, and that all requests via Slack would be ignored. Our public channel was for asynchronous informational questions only (and please read the docs first). If your team has an on-call obligation, it shouldn't be implemented through Slack mentions, it should be through a defined incident management process with the appropriate policies and tools designed for that job.

- Remember that you have a diagnosed condition that can be considered a disability and that your employer must by law make reasonable accommodations for it if you live in the USA. You should insist on being provided a method of work that accommodates you (and you're not even asking for anything that costs money). If you get pushback on this Slack situation, insist in writing that this is a disability issue and you are formally requesting a disability accommodation and include HR on your request. (It's true that HR is there to protect the company and not you, and in this situation that's exactly what they'll do: protect the company from an ADA lawsuit by accommodating your disability)

To be quite honest I'm not even sure your ADHD is actually the problem here. Your company sounds like a nightmare.

I tweak my Slack pretty heavily to suit my ADHD but 90% of it is: turn off (desktop) notifications entirely. Not "sometimes", all of it. (I just set Windows to DND so I still get Slack's red dot) I notice the red dot as soon as it appears anyway, but the lack of bigger visuals & audio means if I'm actually focused (and don't notice the red dot) I don't get yanked out of it.

The other 10% is:

* Mute unnecessary channels

* Turn off mentions entirely for channels where they don't mean much other than "@XYZ is looking at it"

* Set mobile notifications to "only if away" (+ a work hours schedule; if it's important they can click the "notify anyway" link)

* If you're on Android: change the notification sound to something custom that's a lot more "calm" and quieter, because you notice it anyway and it won't give off the "important! DM! check now!" feeling that all of Slack's do. (I miss this on iOS)

* On really bad days (focus-wise): don't be afraid to hide or close Slack entirely to just focus. I usually just put it away in Windows' extended notification tray, so I can occasionally check it without relaunching (or appearing offline/away).

I don't have ADHD and yet I still do all of this. Removing all notification dots/numbers, no previews, muting channels, suppressing mentions in some channels, separating channels into "infrequent"/"team"/"org" sections and keeping some collapsed (looking at them once a day). On mobile removing notification sound, preview and also removing notification from lock screen (only allowing in notification center).

You can also set your status to permanent "responses will be delayed". No one has the right to my attention within a few seconds (except when oncall). I use slack the way it makes me productive.

How do you manage to not click on the slack icon despite having seen the red dot ? When I see the notification icon, I won't be able to focus on something else until I cleared the notification.

Turn off icon badging as well. No notifications really means _no_ notifications. This is the way.

But then there's the anxiety of waiting like 4 hours, opening it, and seeing a bunch of critical messages you weren't around for. I need either a robot that will gently tap me on the shoulder and quietly tell me to check my notifications, or somehow relay the badge to a collar on my dog so he can bark at me. The badge is the worst. The sounds are the worst. At this point I rather just have a landline people can call me on with a voice machine.

> there's the anxiety of waiting like 4 hours, opening it, and seeing a bunch of critical messages you weren't around for.

Tell people to call your phone if it is urgent. Everything else can wait 4 hours, right?

I've completely forgotten about the era when anyone could screen their own calls with the equipment they already had, they just needed to figure out "oh I should let _every_ call go to voicemail after one ring and wait to hear who it actually is first"

How did we go backwards? rhetorical question, but can we bring it back with what we currently have?

>How did we go backwards?

By incentivizing smart people to tinker with silly crap instead of work on meaningful problems.

I have that on my Pixel phone, if it detects a number that isn't in my contacts, it'll auto-screen the call and provide me with a text transcript of their response. I can see what the person says and choose to answer or let them just continue on to leave a message.

And if it thinks it's actually a spam call, I don't even get it ringing, it just quietly "handles" it (but obviously takes a message so I can call back if it was wrong).

ah, that's neat! on my iphone the only option is to send all calls that aren't in my contacts to voicemail, which is just me saying "please send me a text message"

It feels like we're getting back to that with focus states in iOS and Android, but half my apps still don't tell the API who sent the message and just set the notification title... (and some do but they don't link it to the contact, so the anti-DND rule never goes off)

You can hide the app (no badge, no dot visible) and snooze notifications, but leave them on system-wide, and then if someone mentions you with something important, they can click the "yes this is important" confirmation link. (And if someone abuses that then you can mute them personally)

set profile description telling people to call or text you if urgent

I still click it, but I disabled mentions on some more public channels so it doesn't happen as often. If it appears a lot and I need to get stuff done, I just drag Slack into the expanded tray so I don't even see the dot. (the numberless dot, not the [1] badge)

Use the 'mark as unread' as a todo list, so you often have a dot and become desensitized.

I have ADHD, and this is how I use Slack too. Works wonders and makes it manageable.

Another thing I've found useful is just leaving channels where I find little to no value. If there's something important you need to be involved in, 99% of the time you'll get added back and can catch-up to contribute. In my experience with Slack, you end up in channels for "visibility" on things that have no impact on you and you have no impact on.

My mobile slack can make notifications but can't make any sounds. Feels like a good level of 'can get in touch' without disrupting me when I'm not looking at my phone for a while.

I started using 4 virtual desktops to manage distractions many years ago and it’s worked wonderfully for me.

Desktop 1 is for chat, email, Spotify, and general web browsing.

Desktop 2 is for software development only, nowadays VSCode. A separate browser profile is used here and only for development related browsing (docs, stack overflow, live testing).

Desktop 3 is data and system administration. Remote terminals, Excel, database clients, and similar go here.

Desktop 4 is a catch-all. I use it for infrequent activity, like the occasional Photoshop, Word or vendor tooling.

I’ve used this same setup on Windows, OSX, and Linux for 15+ years. I always setup Alt-1,2,3,4 to switch and tweak the OS to remove all animations so it switches instantly.

I’ve found it much easier to stay in the zone this way.

How do you remove the desktop-switching animation on macOS? I'd like to use the virtual desktops feature but the animation is unbearably slow, and I was unable to find a way to disable it online even after extensive searching.

Afaik "just use Linux" still isn't an option on my 2019 (Intel) MBP due to lack of support for basic stuff like Wi-Fi and keyboard :(

System Preferences > Accessibility > Display > enable "Reduce motion"

Though I think this reduces motion on everything, not just the virtual desktop animations. I don't mind that but YMMV.

I have the animations off entirely, be warned though, it requires disabling SIP which is a non starter for many corporate environments.

If you install yabai[0] with its scripting addition, you can configure hotkeys to change spaces with no animations. It's pretty powerful, and I have specific keybinds[1] to do things such as transition to a space with a specific application running.

[0]: https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai

[1]: https://github.com/worm-emoji/dotfiles/blob/140c9fd614ebfc54...

There is an app for this. Reduce motion is still slow fade animation. The app was a little buggy but mostly worked like Linux tiling window managers.

The apps price was a few bucks. I can’t remember the name of it, but I’m looking an will edit if I find it.

Edit: no dice. All I can do is assure you it’s technically possible and some external WM apps out there may do it for you

If you really want to run linux, get a Lenovo Thinkpad. They actually test the hardware with linux distros and even have bios options for Linux sleep states, labeled as such. Give the Macbook to someone who wants to run MacOS. The X1 Carbon line is my favorite, with excellent battery life for basic coding and video watching. Also, power options to set the maximum charge to 80% to preserve the life of the battery. (lithium ion batteries last nearly forever if you keep the charge between 20% and 80%) And yes, it has so much battery to spare that that middle 60% is enough to last a day of coding.

It’s been a while since I set OSX up but there are Super User threads about it. I end up searching each time for the latest methods because I haven’t been able to get it quite as instant as Win/Linux but close enough.

https://superuser.com/questions/35144/speed-up-osx-spaces-by...

I don't know how anyone lives without this. I have six desktops on my MBP with a similar organization:

1. Communication apps

2. Project management, todo lists

3+. Data science and work tools - RStudio, Excel, etc

There is a left-to-right flow: communication influences project roadmaps and to-do lists, which influence what actually gets done. You hang out on the right unless you need info from the left.

Funny, this is exactly to the point how I have it. Unfortunately I haven't found a way to remove animations on OSX, but works well regardless.

How do you prevent ⌘+Tab from automatically jumping you between desktops? At that point, the desktops feel like impediments, not boundaries.

There is some software to have a windows-like alt-tab experience, and you can decide to filter to current desktop or not

Me too, more or less!

Workspace 1: main project, development #2: secondary project, if any #3,4: wildcards, depending on what I need #5: VM management #6: remote screen sessions, admin stuff #7: music #8: email, communications

FireFox browser profile for main work stuff has redirects to keep me off of reddit, etc.

Multi-desktop-crew unite (:

How often do you use “do not disturb” or some similar mechanism to disable notifications?

I've had this exact setup for nearly a decade. Sometimes Slack (or Google Chat) ends up on desktop four.

It really cuts down on distractions.

It’s cool to see others have ended up with similar setups. Desktop four started as either a vm or vnc/rdp client for software that wouldn’t run locally. So that’s why it remains as the catch-all.

For me it housed mocp (later Spotify) and a GUI file manager on occasion. It's nice to leave the first three desktops clean.

Similar here. I’ve blocked all distractions in ublock on my dev and general browsers.

Stage manager actually helps a lot

How do you manage virtual desktops on windows? I used to but found it annoying to maintain which windows go where, when restarting would always reset the settings

https://dexpot.de/?lang=en is really good.

It has hotkey support and pretty much everything you can ask for to quickly manage and switch between desktops and toggle common window attributes like "always on top".

Win10+ has virtual desktops built in, before that I used the SysInternals Desktops utility.

To get Alt-1,2,3,4 working I use AutoHotKey. I can’t recall which script I use (been ages since I changed it) but it works like this one with some edits for keys.

https://github.com/pmb6tz/windows-desktop-switcher

For windows I definitely recommend also installing PowerToys. You can set up different snap grids for each desktop. Keeps things tidy with no overlapping windows.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/

Yeah I used to use W10's virtual desktops; I got tired of having to reconfigure the desktops every time I rebooted the laptop. Big fan of powertoys, although I keep forgetting all the tools it has to utilize though xP

I'll hafta see if they've updated it, and look into fancy zones. They look like the tiling manager I've always wanted in windows

This is an interesting take. What type of virtual desktop do you use?

macOS has it built in, as does windows. There’s a mention of yabai upthread which takes it to the next level.

This is pretty good advice. But if you are going to hide the slack desktop while you are working then you should let people know. Otherwise, people will expect a response real time and wonder why you are ignoring them. It's human nature.

If you always respond instantly you set that expectation for the future. I wouldn’t be expected to respond immediately if I were presenting over Zoom, had just left for a bathroom/drink break, on an important call, or was in the middle of an careful process anyway.

It’s not as if I ignore it completely, I can check Desktop 1 for flashing notifications with a simple left hand only Alt-1, and be back on my working desktop in like a second. That quickly becomes as autonomic as Ctrl-l, n, e, Enter when I’m in a browser.

IMHO expecting synchronous behaviour from asynchronous tools is flawed way to operate; I'd be very comfortable taking a stand against manning these communication channels at all times.

Really depends. At our company there's no expectation that you'll answer Slack messages in real time.

Mute lots of channels by default. Might seem pointless to still keep them in the list, but I consider those like muted bookmarks. You have to mute @channel and @here before muting the channel for some unknown reason.

Turn off @channel and @here notifications for nearly everything other than your team-specific channel that should be only your immediate coworkers and your manager. There used to be an easy way to manage these settings across all your channels in one page, but I can't find it now.

If you have some kind of team alias that people are abusing then talk to your manager about that, and possibly just disable notifications for that. If you have a ticket system, people should be using it, not pinging you on slack all the time.

You should only get notifications for DMs and direct @notifications and @here only for your team channel. If you have a team channel for support people wanting support should post questions there without @here'ing or @person'ing questions. And you should be able to hide that and not answer questions for 30-60 minutes while you're off focusing on something else.

A lot of managing slack is just aggressively ignoring shit because you can't possibly have your finger on the pulse of literally every conversation in slack while getting your other work done. You have to rely on the fact that if it is truly important that you need to be involved in a conversation that you'll get dragged into that conversation later. If you're working somewhere that it doesn't work that way, and you find people bypassing you for things you should be involved in, then find another job.

Definitely keep slack off your phone or at least keep your work slack off your phone.

This is sage advice - I think of slack like the bystander effect - if nobody is explicitly asking you to do something you aren't accountable, but you can help out if you feel like it when it suits you.

If they want a formal response SLA they can use an appropriate tool like service now and its overheads.

Please don't give advice like this on the Internet; you are not a qualified physician, you do not know what this person's life actually is, what medicines they're currently taking, what allergies they have, etc.

You could literally kill someone with the wrong "benign" advice at the wrong time. Turning off Slack won't kill anyone (probably) but suggesting a diet or medication very well could.

Just don't do it.

Interesting links, thanks!

(in case it helps anyone else...) About half a year ago I discovered that a brutally low carb diet -- leading to being in ketosis -- drastically helped my ADHD as well as other mental health things I've struggled with for my entire life. I wish I knew earlier!

I don't think I actually put this together until I read your comment. My actual diagnosis came just after I went off keto after having been doing it pretty steadily for about 3 years. I wonder now if the reason I noticed the symptoms of lack of focus more prior to seeking help and my diagnosis now was because it was better controlled while I was on keto and in ketosis.

I know looking back I still had symptoms. I can remember days during those 3 years just sitting in the office and realizing I had not gotten a single thing actually done and it was mid-afternoon already. But also had stretches of incredible productivity also.

Thanks for the prompt - been considering going back on keto, one of the reasons I went off is the mixed scientific evidence for its efficacy over other diets (not specifically for weight loss, just diet in the context of "way of eating") and some warnings about the lack of long-term study data because it's so hard for individuals to stay on long term. But this gives me another data point to consider and something to watch if I do try it again.

My random opinion: It's best to go on Keto intermittently; say 2 month on, 2 months off, or similar variation. I would be hesitant to be on it permanently, but doing it off and on feels safer to me.

One of the nice things, for me, in terms of having been on Keto occassionally, if that it's given me the ability to go for extended periods without needing to eat. I don't crash, in terms of blood sugar, the way I used to. Even when I'm not eating super low carb.

Two things that might also work, but be easier.

Supplement MCT oil. This turns into keytones in the body. See The Complete Book of Ketones by Mary Newport for all the science. She's got into it for Alzheimers, but the applicability is wider than that.

Go gluten-free and casein-free. That's eliminating wheat and dairy in your diet. Both of these turn into a form of morphine in the body. Look up glutomorphine and casomorphine. A slightly easier diet to stick to than keto. This cured my aspergers.

>Go gluten-free and casein-free. That's eliminating wheat and dairy in your diet. Both of these turn into a form of morphine in the body. Look up glutomorphine and casomorphine. A slightly easier diet to stick to than keto. This cured my aspergers.

This cure for Autism is broadly related to the leaky gut hypothesis of autism, rather infamously propagated by Andrew Wakefield in the 90s more generally and Jenny McCarthy more specifically went after gluten/casein in the 2000s. PETA made an infamous ad saying that milk causes Autism [1] because milk has Casein. This is to say that enough noise got made about this specific claim it got researched a bit.

Generally this diet has specifically been studied for autism treatment and the efficence of it's efficacy is very lacking for me [2][3]

This all being said, this doesn't necessarily mean that nobody can benefit from a casein or gluten free diet, there's simply insufficient evidence to say that people who avoid milk and bagels are autistic less often/less autistic.

[1] https://www.dairyreporter.com/var/wrbm_gb_food_pharma/storag...

[2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-019-04266-9

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7651765/

The problem with those studies is that a Gluten free or a gluten and dairy free diet is not enough to actually treat "leaky gut" or similar issues. It's a bit like saying you can fix an ecosystem by removing two invasive species from the environment. Sure, it might work, but it's such an oversimplification that the results will appear random, or, "inconclusive."

Studying diets is notoriously difficult, and rarely done in a helpful way. Everybody has a different internal ecosystem -- as well as different dietary stimulus, even if they're following the same diet. This makes it incredibly difficult to draw broad conclusions based on controlling just one or two dietary factors.

This is rather unfortunate -- because the right dietary treatments can be truly transformative for many people, for a variety of conditions. However, because of the difficulty of proving this scientifically, such treatments are ignored by the medical community, leaving patients to figure this avenue of treatment out on their own.

The answer, in my opinion, is massive funding -- the kind of funding that can compete with billion dollar drugs (such as Humira). However, that's really not going to happen. Oh well. Sorry for the rant!

Cool. Thanks!

Already using MCT oil in lots of cooking :) Had no idea about dairy... interesting, I eat a lot of high fat cheese.

Thanks for the references, I'll certainly read more.

I had the impression that the gluten/casein morphin thesis has been debunked.

Andrew Huberman recently had a Harvard educated psychiatrist on the podcast. This psychiatrist specialized in treatment resistant mental health conditions. He was trying to help a patient lose weight and inadvertently found it helped their psychiatric symptoms as well. Fast forward 5 years and he had written a book, and the tl;dr is that he has seen many patients improve their conditions be going low / no carb. For patients with less extreme disease they can often get by with low carb and eliminate fructose but keep some healthy complex carbs in their diets. Seriously ill patients may benefit more from full ketosis. In any case, he often reports patients are able to reduce or sometimes eliminate medications on this diet which helps when they have trouble with the side effect profiles.

This episode, right? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjEFo3a1AnI

Dr. Chris Palmer: Diet & Nutrition for Mental Health | Huberman Lab Podcast #99

> My guest this episode is Chris Palmer, M.D., a board-certified psychiatrist and assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He explains the important connection between nutrition, metabolism and mental health and his pioneering work using the ketogenic diet to successfully treat patients with various mental illnesses, including depression and schizophrenia. Dr. Palmer explains how the ketogenic diet is an evidenced-based treatment for epilepsy, mimics the fasted state and can offset the cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s. He describes the key roles of mitochondria in mental health, how certain conditions likely arise from mitochondrial dysfunction, and how low-carbohydrate diets increase mitochondrial turnover to improve mental health. He also explains how low-carbohydrate diets positively impact the gut microbiome and weight loss, important risk factors for mitochondrial health such as marijuana and alcohol, and the best way to increase circulating ketones depending on individual needs. We also cover how a ketogenic diet impacts mood, sleep, and fertility. Dr. Palmer’s work stands as a revolutionary approach to mental health and disease that, given the prevalence of mental health challenges, should be of interest to people of all backgrounds and ages.

I did keto 3 weeks ago.

After 3 days of it, I felt very focused and got done a bunch of stuff I was procrastinating for months.

I thought this was a coincidence.

What makes you think OP needs advice for ADHD treatment? He was diagnosed by a mental health professional. He may be taking medications that work quite well in the right environment.

Why do you assume this advice will make the OP abandon whatever they're doing now and jump to try it?

There are other people suffering from ADHD reading this thread. Some of us appreciate exchange of advice as more avenues to explore - for example, because current treatment regimen (medication and/or otherwise) is working well, and so not worth the risk of messing with it, but could use some addition to address remaining problems. There is no perfect cure for this, there's only stacking person-specific partial solutions until hopefully reaching diminishing returns.

All of these links are about autism, not ADHD. Am I missing something?

Autism is a wide spectrum. Some would consider ADHD part if it. If nothing else, there is lots of overlap.

I have both and I’ve often thought the same. There are so many symptoms in one that are synonymous with the other.

Asperger’s is just a tad bit more on the socially awkward side: inability to understand social cues being a big one. I learned to fake it and it took me a long time to develop genuine empathy in situations demanding raw emotion. I’m still awkward sometimes - unsure of what the socially acceptable response is in a situation.

This is in sharp contrast to my spouse who is also ADHD. She is more easily distracted and has higher dysfunction. Yet, she is socially more aware and talking to people is second nature to her.

I have the social awkward side with the same inability to understand social cues, after many decades I can fake it, but still come across as odd or strange. I guess its the uncanny valley effect. The emotions and empathy is however the opposite, its so strong and raw I have to try and shut it down as its overwhelming.

It's pretty common in discussions about Autism to talk about ADHD due to strong comorbidity in that direction.

OP didn't ask for advice about how to treat their condition. Presumably they prefer to hear that from their doctor, rather than from every stranger they mention their diagnosis to.

If the quality of doctors follows the same distribution as that one of SW engineers, taking advice of a stranger might have a similar use as looking for answers on stack overflow. After all, they are all self-taught..

> If the quality of doctors follows the same distribution as that one of SW engineers

How could you possibly think that it does, considering the entire ocean of difference between their education and training???

Damn it, they have tea on that list of oxalates. Adderal to the rescue!

I have ADHD diagnosed. I turned off all slack notifications. In fact, I almost always turn off all notifications. My mind is my domain and I choose when others can inject into it. The reason is, my job isn't some disaster related topic (well it is because it's climate change related but that disaster doesn't happen tomorrow). So that means, if poeple really need me, they can come find me, email me, send me a message on slack, or whatever. And i will reply to it when i get it. Nobody has ever seemed to have a problem with this and everyone seems to respect that I have limits on when I want to do things because I have my own things to do.

On a related note, I noticed that many of the things I had labeled as ADHD related went away after going to therapy and realizing why I do things to please others, over achieve and stay constantly involved and on top of everything, etc. It was very easy to label that as ADHD but in fact, the motivating factors that pushed me to reply to every email immediately, reply to every slack message, like, comment, subscribe everything was related to my personal schemas and modes. Not to discredit ADHD as a contributing factor, but I suddenly found like I had control over things when I began addressing these underlying internal beliefs.

Ask your company to consider using Microsoft Teams instead. It's so repulsive that you and everyone else will probably be far less willing to communicate at all.

Only half-joking.

A sad salute from a company which mandated teams and force installed it on every person’s desktop.

Slack is getting there “are you sure you wanna make a call, huddles! (presses yes) … are you sure you wanna make a call, huddles! (presses yes) … are you sure you wanna make a call, huddles! (presses yes) …”

And channel bloat that makes my Christmas tree lights jealous.

Believe it or not, Teams/Outlook are actually a lot less awful on Mac OS.

Not sure how you came to that conclusion regarding outlook, one of the reasons I moved to Windows from osx was the mac version of outlook was so terrible.

Haha I just posted here that we seriously switched to MS Teams at some point for that exact reason, but couldn’t stomach it, it really is just worse than “bad enough not to use it much”

I work mostly with Engineering teams, and consider slack inbound a pathology. Slack is great for collab in places, but it’s not a strong way to manage inbound, IMO.

The teams I’m responsible for make it easy for their stakeholder to raise issues, asks in a more deliberate, calmer way e.g. via GitHub issues or manager email. In exchange, we commit to mutually agreed response times on certain categories of business critical issues.

Generally, I don’t think it takes an ADHD diagnosis for slack inbound to completely kill your productivity, it’s a general problem. I don’t have ADHD but have strong empathy for how this must be a complete nightmare for you.

Perhaps have a manager put some structure on your inbound on your behalf?

It starts with a culture where I'm not sweating the fact that I haven't checked my Slack notifications in a while.

Slack is used like a kitchen sink in the two places I've used it - there is no easy way to determine what is urgent vs what can wait. One literally has to comb through all the red dots to filter them. If you believe channels solve this because you can create dedicated channels for the important stuff, very soon someone starts abusing the responsiveness on this channel to their selfish ends, first seeking an exception, and very soon making it a habit.

To top this, the Slack UX is literally designed to maximize the time one spends with it. I often find myself on Slack intending to either - 1. Check one of the important channels or 2. Recollect something someone shared that I now need to use

And before I know it, I'm responding to something that I didn't need to at this time. I often also forget why I came here in the first place.

Yes, email and ticketing are also pervaded by spam, but Slack is essentially a corporate sponsored, culturally accepted medium for noise and distraction with no easy way to apply controls.

You typically need strong leadership to define the constraints through culture, because the tool by itself isn't designed for this.

I completely agree.

I am so fed up with this problem that I'm not going to mince words.

Nobody wants to be told they're disorganized and sloppy, but people outside engineering (especially sales and client people) are the absolute worst. They're the ones with the ADHD.

Engineers rarely have trouble with deep focus on work unless they're constantly being nagged by idiots who don't understand what they're costing the company.

There's a strong business case against the abuse of chat for "quick questions" or whatever other bullshit people are too dumb to figure out on their own if they just spent a few seconds more in thought before bothering anyone else.

I'm curious about what you mean by "inbound". It sounds like messages from someone "outside" but not sure if that is probably a limited definition.

Inbound = something that requires a response/action. Could be an automated alert that creates a ticket, could be a slack message from someone asking for something.

If you're not great with it every message can feel like an inbound and you're compelled to go cycle through all the channels and read everything whether it's immediately relevant or not.

I think the meaning of inbound here refers to work that is defined or asked of you or a team via Slack instead of via more thought-out and defined work.

Step 1 - turn off all notifications, noise and badges. This will allow you to not be disturbed by interruptions.

Step 2 - if step 1 doesn’t work then shut slack down while working. Being reachable 100% of the time is insane. And the barrier for bugging is super low with Slack.

Step 3 - if 2,3 don’t work then use something like dispatch.do to prioritize all the junk and filter out all the noise.

Step 4 - it’s a you problem. Find a new job or seek professional help.

I would add: delete the slack app, and use it from a browser. Then you'll only get notifications when the browser is in the foreground. (Of course assuming you've disabled browser notifications).

This way you can leave slack running, you will show up as available, but will not be disturbed unless the slack tab is in the foreground. (Or someone makes a call).

That's a great tip for reducing notifications further. Alert fatigue is a bigger problem than organisations often realise.

Another big advantage of using Slack in a browser is being able to customize everything using addons like Stylus (I customize colours and fonts).

oh good point. someone should write an extension that only pings you based on critical rules, like if someone writes "bump", or "hey were you able to check on that?" or if 5 DMs have piled up, then it releases the notification. Honestly slack should do this themselves

>someone should write an extension that only pings you based on critical rules, like if someone writes "bump", or "hey were you able to check on that?" or if 5 DMs have piled up, then it releases the notification. Honestly slack should do this themselves

I ran into this issue at a large corp. I was a subject matter expert on how a certain product worked so literally would get 500+ notifications daily from (mostly sales) people asking the same questions. I set an auto-reply to anyone that mentioned me that included a link to FAQ and directed them to SEs or CS folks who were responsible for answering these sort of questions. I also linked a recording to the last webinar where I went over what's new and answered questions and a link to the next upcoming one. In the auto-response I set the expectation that a response from could take up to 5 days. This more or less solved that issue.

As for my own channel surfing to avoid working. That's a WIP. Best advice I can give is to maintain a task list. When you catch yourself surfing, go to the task list and see if there is something you can knock off.

The first person to write a chatgpt slack bot called Anton that reads all of your local corp docs will make a mint (with security controls)

Free idea folks.

That's an excellent solution. I think part of it is also being comfortable and firm and not teaching others that "Hey he's the go to guy and he answers questions immediately and is super helpful". Eventually the problem sorts itself out. And even if it doesn't, so what, you're one person. There are limits and real costs to being a human operating switchboard.

Here's what I have found helps:

1. Mute any channel that you don't absolutely need to have active.

2. Use the slack-calendar integration if it's available for whatever calendar solution your team uses.

3. Add meetings in your calendar for yourself for doing work. Many people at my company will label these as "focus time", "Heads down on project work" or the like.

Depending on the slack integration, it will show that you are in a meeting. If not you can set your status to something like suggested above, and you can mute your notifications for the duration.

I'll often additionally let the people I work closest with know how they can get hold of me if something is truly urgent "Hey, I go super heads down on project work from 12-5 most days, if something super urgent comes up you can call me at ###-####".

You probably seen this advice before but just in case, here is what worked for me (and should work for anyone, even without ADHD)

1. block time in your calendar, and let your peers and managers know that you are "blocking time to do your actual job"

2. there are slack plugins that auto set you as away / turn off notifications when you have an outlook / calendar meeting

3. use a pomodoro timer

4. focusatwill powertools with noise canceling headphones

5. important - lot's of the distraction is due to FOMO, a simple question that someone asks to get unblocked becomes a forced "meeting without a meeting" where people feel like if they don't respond then their voice will not be heard. This needs talking to the team and coming up with some ground rules to avoid it. You want people to use slack to get unblocked, you don't want people to force others into a FOMO based hour long thread.

6. Agree not to use slack as a ticketing system / documentation system. If someone reports a bug on slack, great, now it's the reporter's responsibility to put it in GitHub Issues / Linear / JIRA etc. Slack is terrible as a ticketing system. If you need something to get done, open a ticket.

7. Your last sentence makes a lot of sense, opening it 2-3x times a day is a great idea.

“ I don't want to be that person that's not reachable”

You’re always reachable via email, just don’t open slack ever unless you want to ask someone else a question who prefers slack.

> I don't want to be that person that's not reachable but more and more, I'm thinking about closing Slack and opening it 2-3x a day.

What's wrong with that? That's how many people work with Slack (myself included). I don't answer whenever someone asks me something; I answer in a specific allocated timeslot during the day (2 to be precise: the very first thing in the morning, and 2h before finishing my day)

+1

And if you're in a role where you are expected to respond promptly (say, you're an SRE or sysadmin that's on-call) there should be other, better avenues to reach out like a ticketing system, pagerduty or opsgenie, etc.

Slack is ultimately destructive to deep work - it fragments your attention by definition.

The expectation to focus on complex tasks while holding multiple side conversations does not consider the limitations of the human condition.

The people who chatter all day most likely don’t engage in deep work.

Nothing wrong with you, the expectations are unrealistic.

Slack demands you to follow all the time or you lose the ability to participate in decisions. This is incredibly demanding and destructive.

Make checking your messages part of your routine, as opposed to an interruption of said routine. More concretely, set certain time windows of your day, be it hourly or every 4 hours, where you check Slack and reply to relevant messages, after which you drop it again until the next window.

Turn off all Slack notifications (or close out of it all together) and set daily and repeating calendar events that say “check Slack” to pop up instead. That’s how I’ve setup all kinds of reoccurring but otherwise distracting tasks and it works great.

A few years ago I joined an employer that doesn't have chat at all (a university, schools and government seem to be where you're most likely to find this) and after a few months I marveled over why I was getting so much done without working overtime and why I wasn't so exhausted when I got home.

I am healthier in every way (the visible change literally makes people's jaw drop), I have energy for a social life and side projects, and my work is higher quality than ever. I'm making a lot less than I could elsewhere but right now it's worth it.

I don't have (diagnosed) ADHD, but this keeps me sane:

1. mute all @here or @channel notifications. Those are almost never critical. If somebody needs you to do something, they'll DM you.

2. pick a handful of channels that are important and mute all others (in that they don't show up as having unread messages). Those are the channels that you'll want to read all messages in.

3. Block 1-3 daily calendar entries with 15 minutes in them in your calendar for Slack time. This is the time where you will read the messages from 2. and respond. Feel free to extend the time blocks if you need to if it's up and you aren't done. You'll look at channels in 2. outside of these time blocks.

4. If there is something urgent going on (ie production outage), you'll deviate from this and that's fine.

"I'm thinking about closing Slack and opening it 2-3x a day."

You've found your own fix. There's nothing wrong with shutting down distractions. Just let people know about it.

My problem has been the open office environment. If I need to get stuff done I put on some headphones and focus on my job. Everyone knows that I'm working and leave me alone unless it's important.

I have regained a lot of focus by using the Unread filter. I don't think it's on by default, you have to go into settings. I use it to mark the events in my day where I go to slack. I just hit the unread filter, read through all that I need or want to, respond, and then decide if I'm going to be in slack for a while (e.g. A conversation that will be having a lot of back of forth) or if I can safely context switch back to whatever I was doing or something new. The Unread filter has keyboard shortcuts too, so you can navigate stuff quickly.

This may also be an opportunity to raise the issue. If it's not your style to be direct about it, consider just asking in your team channel for advice on this very issue. Maybe it's an important conversation to open up at your workplace.

Yes, unread messages is the best way to consume slack.

I have had adhd and autism. Thought it was a birth trait. But adulthood happened and i had been getting away more and more from those symptoms.

Now it’s coming back. And I realized it has a lot to do with parenting incorrectly.

Let’s just say looking back, there is nothing you can do to adjust to a moving train with adhd. So start reducing your role. Shrink a bit. Be less manager. and be more managed if that helps. And start communicating loudly about what makes slack difficult. Very loudly. People will realize who you are without realizing you have adhd. And will adjust to how you work.

So figure out how many things you can track at any one time. My max is five. So reduce your inputs to just those items. And designate one of them for colleagues.

I often close Slack when I need to focus on something. And I'll spend hours of the day with my phone on do-not-disturb

If you're needing to be urgently-reached multiple times a day, there's something seriously wrong at your company. Almost any message should be able to wait a few hours

You mention "tickets piling up", which sounds like it goes beyond Slack. If these are actual tasks piling up faster than you can complete them, that's a whole separate problem with the company and has nothing to do with you or your adhd

If the company does have systemic issues that are making it hard to function on the job, I'd suggest looking elsewhere. Or at least talking about it with your manager

Slack is great in small doses, but a complete time-waster beyond a certain threshold. I don't have ADHD, but I still have had problems with Slack. Don't feel bad about shutting all notifications off, or, better yet, closing the app entirely, and only opening it once or twice a day. You will almost instantly feel better. Some people may get annoyed that you're not instantly available, but if you're not able to get your work done then many more people will get annoyed. There is no perfect solution.

I think the most logical solution is to plan your own daily calendar for this. If you are not working in a position like support, you can stay away from slack completely and only check it during break times.

Lots of advice here about things you can do, but remeber that your work is relational: you and your company can work together to find a solution that works for you. I see this as a JEDI (justice, equality/equity, diversity, and inclusion) issue. Your company should be willing to make reasonable adjustments to accommodate you.

Turning off all notifications except for direct-to-you seems reasonable, unless you're being paid to be on-call or something and it's truly critical that you be responsive to the team notifications? Batch checking it every few hours at a specific time. I've started doing this with slack/discord/etc. anyway, although I'm still responsive to signal -- and I wish there were a better protocol for "signal by default doesn't notify, but trusted contacts can choose to notify if they want".

(My first thought: Oh wow, I would be tempted to try to get an ADHD diagnosis if it got me legally immune from Slack (and Teams, ideally), and forced everyone to use Signal, IRC, or some other less disgusting systems when interacting with me.)

You do want to be that person that is not reachable. There is no value in being available 24/7 unless your job is oncall and responsible for addressing fires in real-time.

Shut off slack, sign-off and coach people on how to reach you. They should rely on batch systems that you check a couple times a day or they can call or however else contact you in an emergency that requires real-time engagement.

You can also do office hours, where you are reliably online and chatting at known and published time.

Slack is cool because it makes everyone feel important in exchange for them giving up their time and productivity.

If you have ADHD and can't concentrate when people are trying to contact you all the time, you should be that person who is unreachable.

That doesn't mean you can't set expectations to help people figure out how to contact you, or give escalation paths if somebody does need you immediately

Exactly. If you’re constantly available you’ll spend all your time on Slack fielding unrefined queries. “Hey did someone on your team touch X recently, because blah blah blah.” Just turn off notifications and ignore it. If it’s important for you personally, it will eventually end up in your email. Let all the people who (for whatever reasons) want to be constantly available be your low pass filter.

> company that uses Slack heavily. They have 1000+ channels and my team is tagged in a lot of stuff

It's possible that the entire company has problems here -- with communication/organizing efficiency, and with lots of activity that might not be very productive (spending lots of time operating Slack, and being interrupted by it).

You might not be able to solve the entire-company problem. But you should talk with your manager, if you trust them. They could interface sideways and up the chain of command, and with HR -- on behalf of their reports' health and the effectiveness of their unit, and maybe more broadly (depending how hierarchical the company is).

Consider medication if you haven't already. You don't have to take amphetamines, there are drugs like guanfacine that isn't a stimulant at all, and bupropion that is a weak stimulant used for depression that also works for ADD/ADHD. Bupropion helped me a lot with concentration.

Not everything is important. Not all mentions, threads, conversations, channels are important.

Prioritize the most important ones.

Using Slack subsections I prioritize like so:

  1. P0 - Stakeholders and Peers
    Includes my manager, and peers I work with regularly
    Includes announcement groups
    Includes leadership groups
  2. P0 - Adhoc Conversations
    Anything with a P0 individual
  3. P1 - Reports
    All of my direct reports
  4. P0 - Incidents
    Anything that needs my attention
    Alerts, monitors, etc
  5. P0 Engineering
  6. Almost everything else
  7. Guilds and Social

Hope it helps.

If something is important enough, it will reach you.

> I don't want to be the person that's not reachable

^ you have to

unscheduled communication isn't something your brain can recover from

check in one time per day. only read your inbound @username. do not browse or scroll

otherwise if someone wants to talk to you, let them schedule it a day in advance

This may be less or more helpful depending on your role and company culture.

When you are junior, you better be responsive. The more senior you are, the more important it is for you to own and drive your own agenda, which can only be done by consciously ignoring a ton of noise (or even valuable signal, if it's not valuable to your agenda). I can imagine this is even more important with ADHD.

The way I run my work life is, I have a document of 10-15 key things that are on my radar to push, out of which 3-4 are on my "crush first" list.

These are really important, strategic, big things. I remind myself that if I get these done but nothing else it would be a huge win. On the other hand, of I get a lot done of random stuff but not these, it's a fail.

That gives me licence to tune out the noise that isn't relevant to my goals. And to politely decline meetings, etc. Don't get me wrong, if a senior leader wanted to talk about something that's not on my list, I won't decline that meeting - but I assume that because he or she is voting with their time, it's probably actually important.

What I am getting at here is that if you define a valuable agenda, you can operate in a more 'pull' than 'push' way - meet with people and follow channels that you know ahead of time are relevant to the 3 things you care about today, and give yourself licence to ignore the rest.

Your manager can be helpful here. Meet w him/her and say: these are the 15 things on my radar, of which these 3 are top priority. Is that right?

If your manager confirms (or corrects) your priorities, it gives you some licence to ignore other stuff too.

Slack has some pretty fine grained notification controls. You can set it up so only certain channels notify, or so that only direct mentions notify, or so that only dms notify.

You can also just turn off notifications altogether. Explain to your colleagues that slack is keeping you from getting work done so you are going to turn off notifications. If you feel guilty give them a way to contact you if they truly need you immediately.

I have personally introduced "timed checkins" for my company. I'll reload slack once every 2, 3 hours and then answer everything, then go back to my regularly scheduled task.

Yes, do exactly what you think you need to do. I've been staving off this from happening by making it very clear to my boss why my tickets are piling up, and why expecting me to check in on multiple threads for the possibility of me being needed on them is an incorrect expectation. I make it as clear as I can to people, that if they need my attention on something, tag me in a Jira comment or DM me. Communication is a part of my duties, but it should never require all of my energy.

Now, of course, since my manager has shifted from being an engineer to climbing a management ladder, my needs make zero sense to him, and he thinks that since he can monitor 100s of channels concurrently and attend meetings literally all day every day, surely I should be able to do whatever his pet issue is that day. He also feels like checking in on the status of a ticket every fucking day is going to help me do it faster, but it's the way it is, the systems companies thoughtlessly adopt push us out. Ultimately, this is going to push and pull until I'll probably be underwater too long and either get fired or quit. So my advice is to figure out if you have any possibility of staying, and do what you feel you need to in protecting your sanity, until you leave.

Do not try and fulfill this expectation. It's dumb and you're the wrong person for it. If it gets to a certain point, make it clear that they should hire someone else who's specifically good at that, if that's what they define the job to be.

Frankly, how does anybody get any work done in such a setup?

Long gone seem to be the days when Joel Spolsky was arguing for uninterrupted work as a key factor to getting things done [1]. It's even one of the 12 points on his test.

https://www.geekwire.com/2016/just-shut-let-devs-concentrate...

Have you considered that you might just have a Slack problem? honestly.

Labels can be dangerous and polarising - individual psychology and behaviour fall on a nuanced multidimensional spectrum, and I think these labels target such a large range and severity of behaviour that they have a high risk of conflating symptoms with completely different causes. Combined with misaligned intensives to sell drugs, I'm highly sceptical of the majority of diagnoses.

I was diagnosed with dyslexia at a young age, but it turns out I was just a stubborn child who disliked accepting the seeming illogic of the written English language where other kids are usually less questioning and do what they are told, compared to truly? or "more" dyslexic people who genuinely struggle with placing letters in the correct order rather than merely bothering to remember them. This is the danger of diagnosing what is supposed to be a neurological disorder through relatively subtle behavioural symptoms.

It's completely possible to exhibit "ADHD" symptoms from an unhealthy work life... WFH and covid has caused instant messaging like Slack to take centre stage in all communication, and that has definitely messed with a lot of people's ability to focus on their work, myself included. I've had to take some quite extreme measures, making sure it's completely closed between certain times (not in away mode, but actually not loaded, unreachable). If there is an emergency, people have your phone number, sometimes you need time to yourself and that's when people can wait, unless it's an emergency.

> Combined with misaligned intensives to sell drugs, I'm highly sceptical of the majority of diagnoses.

ADHD and executive disfunction are under-diagnosed rather than over-diagnosed (I have so many friends who have obvious undiagnosed adhd), mostly because of parents who think like you, or the classic "it does not exist, you're just a slacker, pharma is just trying to sell you some drugs". Most physicians who diagnose you don't make any significant additional money from selling you drugs.

> It's completely possible to exhibit "ADHD" symptoms from an unhealthy work life

Or maybe OP really has severe ADHD?

> or the classic "it does not exist, you're just a slacker, pharma is just trying to sell you some drugs"

I don't think it doesn't exist, I think it's not a useful label. Partly due to the way it's treated as a long term issue that should be addressed with drug use, and partly because it can often be unhelpful to the individual's own psychological state, some people flip into an "i'm broken" mode and stay hidden behind it rather than make progress.

There is however good reason to believe in over diagnosis. ADHD is considered a neurological disorder due to physiological differences in the brain. However it's diagnosed through observation of a combination of individually non-unique behavioural symptoms... which is why when you are suspected of ADHD, you are sent to a psychiatrist.

Regardless of whether the cause of such behaviour is physiological or purely environmental, in both cases environmental factors can have a huge impact on how it affects you, this is pretty obvious for anyone who has been in the presence of someone severely autistic. Drugs are not the answer to everything, and not usually a healthy long term solution.

> it's treated as a long term issue that can only be addressed with drug use.

But that's what it is? Drugs aren't the only treatment, but they are by far the most effective.

> but they are by far the most effective.

That depends on how efficacy is measured.

Drugs appear the most effective because they can substantially change behaviour in the short term (for better and worse), they are fast. But it's not necessarily stable, and it's only cost is not monetary. Psychology is transient, even when there are underlying physiological components, and although slow to effect, consistent changes to daily routine and environment can result in a more stable outcome. But it also takes effort, analysis and consideration, drugs are easy.

There is a place for both. There are people like me who are over cautious of drug use, and sometimes they are in a position where their mental state is so messed up that it really makes sense in the short term to medicate, but it should be short term.

[edit]

To make this more tangible... consider my original suggestion. ADHD symptoms, whatever the underlying cause, will be triggered by attention sapping activities, like being subjected to Slack every minute of your working day. Turning it off for long periods will help regardless. Also having the mindset of "my environment is broken" rather than "I am broken" is far more positive and healthy, it's also more realistic, because frankly, we are all broken in different ways and need to either find the right environment for us, or change it.

They are effective at first, and then you become tolerant and either need to increase your dosage for the same effect, or take a break (which can be difficult to suffer through because now you're operating at less than baseline functioning until homeostasis kicks in, which can take a week or longer). And e.g. Adderall was only released in 1996, so there hasn't been much time to study the long-term effects.

This happens with most drugs, not just for ADHD. Even caffeine (another kind of CNS stimulant, but less potent). Remember your first cup of coffee, how nice and awake you felt after you drank it?

Please don't take this the wrong way, btw. This is coming from someone who was also diagnosed with ADHD but stopped taking the meds because I didn't think they were worth it in the long term. I just drink coffee and take occasional week-long coffee breaks now. But everyone's different and I'm sure these drugs are an absolute necessity for some people, despite the risks.

Another reason it is under-diagnosed is because what it takes to get diagnosed. One of my children has ADHD (got it from me) and to get it officially diagnosed so it would be accepted by school and such required testing that cost >$3k. Costing that much it is not surprising it is under-diagnosed.

OP's post strongly implies that they were diagnosed with ADHD long before the issues with Slack.

I'm really sorry. As someone else diagnosed with ADHD it's been very hard for me to be positive about anything. Hang in there, I guess... life just seems impossible.

> They have 1000+ channels and my team is tagged in a lot of stuff so I get a lot of notifications.

You don't have to have ADHD to struggle with something as intense as this. We also have the same problem. I have probably 250+ channels in my sidebar.

I treat it like email. Muted everything. Read things sporadically. Mostly Cmd-Shift-Escape to mark everything is read.

Use a CLI with push/pull methods. Treat it like email. Check once every couple hours

I got diagnosed a year ago.

Best resources I've found: https://adhdjesse.com/newsletter (this taught me about rejection sensitive dysphoria, ouch) and https://www.adhddd.com/anti-planner/

It sounds Slack is being used wrong. You should not be in that many channels.

If there are tickets assigned to you and those tickets have Slack channels, you should be in those channels. You shouldn't be in other ticket channels.

Your entire team shouldn't be pulled into large numbers of channels.

Feel free to ignore channel messages for anything that isn't your area or assigned task, unless someone mentions you with @ directly. Respond only to DMs, and messages related to tasks you are working on. Don't even look at anything else unless you have spare cycles, other than maybe some general channel that is for your team only.

Same diagnosis and exp here. Welcome to notification hell. Problem is all of these bs communication apps are treated as synchronous instead of asynchronous and managers think it helps when in reality it causes distractions, extra stress and loss of productivity.

1000 slack channels. Lol wtf.

Here’s what i do and it’s helped. I turned them ALL off. Banners, badges, bells. All of it. I check on my terms.

ADHD diagnosed, continuously self employed since a teenager. Nobody at work would even guess this condition rules every thought and action of my life.

My advice is simple; extend unbounded empathy to everyone and it'll come back. Be open and honest about what you need (though you don't need to specify why).

Find an environment that fosters everyone, neurodiverse or otherwise, to be the complex humans they are while protecting their right to privacy.

The tools are usually not the problem, but their use often points to a cultural issue.

Focus on knowing yourself and the culture you need to thrive. Then find it, build it, champion it, advocate for it, explain it and respect with empathy resistance to it.

People will thank you.

Fellow ADHDer and corporate VP here. Making an assumption you’re US-based. If you feel comfortable with your boss and HR, consider requesting an accommodation. ADHD is protected under the Americans with Disabilities Act. I’ve gotten accommodations several times in my career and it’s generally a non-controversial process at most companies.

As a rule, I don’t use Slack for productive work, nor for productive relationships. The noise is high. The interface is poor. The incentive is to not get anything done.

Backing my own experience up, I don’t have a single high-performance friend/collaborator that is invested in the Slack experience. However, I am familiar with well-paid and tuned out managers who love Slack.

Your idea of separation (checking 2-3x per day) is the appealing solution in this case.

Hi, I’m sorry you are feeling overwhelmed. My advice:

* Slack goes to the separate small monitor, not the big “work” monitor. Expense one up if you don’t have one.

* Sure thing, close Slack up from time to time. It might help to assign yourself some “office hours” (look at slack after lunch)

* Slack strength (its immediacy) is also its weakness (low permanency). Anything older than a week is forgotten. So- rejoice! Your backlog has just reduced to the last week, tops.

* You can mute with granularity: channels, people and threads. Mute away. Remove yourself from the “team” mentions. Remove yourself from “@here” mentions.

Changing notifications settings can get you pretty far. Also worth spending time chatting with your manager or peers to understand exactly what the expectations are for response time. It may be that you have a lot more leeway than you're giving yourself.

Here's how I configure my notifications, FWIW: https://scribehow.com/shared/How_to_Manage_Your_Slack_Notifi...

Just close it when you don't need it. It's not a problem until someone complains.

Our manager was recently talking about the importance of everyone being together in the office, for maximum real-time collaboration.

He would be delighted to hear about OPs Slack situation. "Look at all the collaboration!"

Anyway, similar in-person problems can also make it hard to focus. Even if you are not part of a conversation, you hear it nearby and tune in. (Yes, headphones can help.)

At least Slack is easier to mute.

Star channels and people with occasional activity that are important for your day-to-day work (not necessarily all the "team" ones). Create a section at the very top above Starred with the places and people that you need to talk to daily. Customize your alert/sound settings, and right click channels to change each of their notifications and mute status. Better yet, leave the ones that don't matter. Ignore the lower channels when they become bold and look at them once a week when you have the time. If something critical in an unusual spot happens people will DM you so don't worry.

I was in the same situation, I tried EVERYTHING, including supplements (mucuna pruriens help a bit), no slack (affects my work), full screen emacs only (same) and a long etcetera.

In addition to everything that was said... (no notifications, etc). The solution for me? : Medication. After trying not to be medicated for few years I talked to a psychiatrist and got a prescription for concerta.

Let's say I wish I did that 20 years ago.

Try opening it in a web browser tab (you don't actually need to install the electron app).

Next, deny the notification permission when prompted by the browser, disable phone app notifications, etc.

Finally, if necessary, set your slack status to "If this is urgent, text me at 123-456-7890"

simply turn it off during the day and check at predetermined intervals

Please ignore if you're already doing this and/or know this stuff.

I strongly advice behavioral therapy. Not any therapy, this is crucial. Find yourself a therapist that focuses and is an expert on behavioral therapy and work with him to build up the tools you need to survive in this work environment with your condition.

They can help you build healthy habits, drop destructive behaviors and give you several tools to organize and monitor yourself. Basically, build up your brain muscle with the skills it naturally lacks due to your condition.

It's a common problem, probably most common name for it is "information overload". There is a new skill needed today where you need to find ways of dealing with the "signal vs noise" problem. There is just so much information that if you try to take in everything, you'll be overloaded. Instead, you need to figure out some way of filtering incoming information so more "signal" than "noise" gets through to you. I'm sure having ADHD makes this a lot harder too.

Rather than giving you some specific advice, best advice I have for you is to lookup existing resources that deal with "information overload", try searching for that on your favorite search engine.

In the past, there been a lot of threads on HN as well with good advice that you can browse through, probably you'll find at least one idea that can help you a bit. Here is an example search for "Ask HN information overload" sorted by score: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I'm not diagnosed with ADHD, but Slack's notification noises trigger a visceral fight-or-flight response in me. Not PTSD surely, but in that spectrum.

This was from an early stage startup experience with 10 hour timezone deltas, and never-not being on call for some crucial infrastructure.

The sounds still evoke the dread,annoyance, and simmering resentment that accompanied a 4AM slack ping with the CTO just saying "Hey"

I know how you feel, after a few years of fully remote working, that knocking sound makes me cringe and twitch.

The fear response is real.

>The sounds still evoke the dread,annoyance, and simmering resentment that accompanied a 4AM slack ping with the CTO just saying "Hey"

You're such a good writer! Goddamn, you gave me the chills just with this line.

People here will share all sorts of productivity hacks, but your workplace is legally required to make reasonable concessions to accommodate disabilities. Talk to your manager and/or HR and figure something out.

There's already lots of good advice for you personally.

This advice isn't necessarily for you but for anyone who can set slack policies to help manage the volume.

Channels w/ >7 people or 1 team:

- No @here.

- New ideas start are threads only. Just like email, give a Subject that's meaningful but not the full picture. All discussion related to that subject stay in the thread.

More advance teams:

- Use emojis to help signify topics at a glance. ?, !, at the leftmost position.

Turn off all notifications. Insist that your team create a single channel to triage all requests to them, make sure no engineers are in there just your PO (or a nominated person each day/week or whatever). Have everyone read Team Topologies and its follow up about remote work. Try to help everyone in the company understand that cognitive overhead is the mind killer.

> I don't want to be that person that's not reachable but more and more, I'm thinking about closing Slack and opening it 2-3x a day.

What's wrong with this?

Also, learn to mute channels we have thousands too, I'm in about 20-50 at a given time between pruning. Out of those I only keep important, low noise channels unmuted.

To think that the decades of email suffering finally ended with... slack. Now I look back at those email driven times with relative fondness. Slack is being used to drive multiple, concurrent SYNCHRONOUS discussions. Left unchecked, none of us will survive in-tact !

I will admit to loving it sometimes (being jacked in) but it always leads to burnout.

I don’t know if it’s enough, but the first thing I do when joining a new organization is aggressively cut down on notifications, both using the N app, preferences, and the operating system preferences. The next thing I do is set expectations with coworkers, the same tool can be used very differently across different organizations.

I set up windows when I check slack with my team and use mac's focus features to disable it's notifications outside the windows.

I work with a person who has ADHD and is also a fantastic colleague. After we first met the team structure changed in such a way that they were less confronted with most everybody in the department and more working in a more isolated environment. This person has flourished since, possibly as a result of this change.

I don't know what size company you work in, but based on the super scientific sample size of 1, asking for a transfer to a more isolated team may help.

1/ I read slack and email once a day. Sometimes once every two days. Sometimes I miss slack messages. If it is urgent, people reach out to me.

2/ I only look at slack messages sent to me as direct messages. Also I scan mentions and threads where I have participated.

3/ At a meta-level I have learned that giving up the attachment to looking good is the biggest boost to looking good.

Setup focus time "meetings" on your calendar where you schedule time to be off slack - people can call you during them if they have to - and close out slack entirely when you're in those blocks.

You can’t be on slack 100% of the day. Just time box when you’re available on slack. Put it on your calendar so others know. Simple solution.

Slack is an asynchronous communications system. Disable notifications and only look at it when want, like you do for email. You won't be that person that is not reachable as you will be, but on your terms and not theirs. The main thing is to try to be consistent and communicate your process so that people can gauge their expectations.

My previous company had many slack channels and they would always tag @here or @all

I simply ignored slack. Too much noise to be useful.

I had two or three channels that I would regularly check, and that's it.

I have the opposite problem. I concentrate so much that I forget to read my e-mails and other notifications, and people get angry with me.

Consider moving to a smaller company. You're going to get a lot of interruptions even with the right tools at any large company.

I agree slack is awful. People run discovery and project management through slack and it is insane.

I’ve been trying to think of slack applications and associated software to tame that beast.

So Close slack man. That sounds like a workable solution. But first!!

You have a diagnosed disability talk to HR or your boss for an accommodation. You get formal legal protections in the USA when you disclose.

A lot of folks are hesitant to do this for good reasons. But If you are at a large company you are probably not the only one though. And if they decide to fire you for any reason they have to think twice or three times.

But you are probably a great worker etc… your disability is a creative asset and a super power when you can concentrate, so come up with a plan. Talk to your doctor or therapist about what accommodations would be reasonable. Maybe even talk with a disability/employment lawyer to understand what is reasonable. Not too sue but to understand what your rights are. This counts as doing your homework for any future issues.

Your company depending their sophistication should work with you.

People using slack in this way makes it sound like the entire company has ADHD.

At a previous company I had a very similar problem, and eventually converted an old SIM-less phone into my Slack device and mounted it in a stand on my desk. (Slack was not deemed a sensitive company app that had to run on company devices, which considering the access to customer channels and prod-affecting chatops features seemed stupid, but I'm not IT.)

I could physically turn Slack off by turning the phone off, and the only other way to get through to me was async, via email or in tickets.

A coworker I trusted had my personal cell number and texted me when something was actually urgent, which happened twice in 6 months.

Also I'd really strongly suggest that you push your company away from a team @ alias and toward a team channel. The only groups that should have an @ alias that punches through notification settings are on-call, and if your role IS on-call then no amount of Slack changes will reduce interrupts.

People create one @ alias per team and also many others for subteams or temporary project teams, etc. There is one for oncall too. Every time one of those aliases gets tagged, I get a notification, an orange counter or sometimes messages from Slackbot asks me to join the channels.

*> punches through notification settings

I'd like to specify which aliases should not be ignored but I can't in Slack, unless I'm missing something.

Also, disabling the oragen counter is not possible (even for muted channels).

If you live in the U.S., you might look into asking for an accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

I don't know whether or not it's always a smart move, but my understanding is that it reduces the risk that your employer will give you an unreasonably hard time.

You are hardly the first person to complain that slack is a distraction. You could bring it up with your manager (no need to mention ADHD), as a team-wide fix is likely to be the most effective.

I think your idea of limiting Slack is great. You can provide an alternative to be reachable for emergencies if needed.

In addition in my reading, I've come across some helpful nutritional approaches and these were news to me:

http://doctoryourself.com/hoffer_ABC.html http://doctoryourself.com/adhd.html

(These articles are geared towards parents with ADHD kids, but applies to adults also.)

I'm getting a lot of red flags from this website. It reads like a marketing campaign to sell the writers books and vitamins. All of the "evidence" is anecdotal. As someone who struggled with ADHD their whole life, it's demeaning to read. "Your kid has ADHD? Oh he just needs some niacin."

Guy is a total quack. Literally vitamins to cure cancer.

- Turn your sound off - Change how you get notified - Set your editor to fullscreen - give it its own virtual desktop - Learn the keybindings to be able to switch back and forth very quickly

Slack sometimes feels like a party app than internal messaging tbh. Always feels in a community and in the moment, than picking up tasks and handling it. Maybe that’s what productivity means but just sometimes feels wrong.

Start taking your medication, you going to feel less annoying and expensive multi-tasking.

Also, I'm trying an App "Sensa" which promises help the executive dysfunction cause by the ADHD.

> I don't want to be that person that's not reachable but more and more, I'm thinking about closing Slack and opening it 2-3x a day.

This is fine.

Quality answers every couple of hours are better appreciated then nonsense rapid spam.

I don't have ADHD and I hate this too. I vastly prefer mail, not only because people put more effort in formulating their questions, but also because asynchronous communication is more accepted here.

Such tools can be quite a lot of distraction... I often ignore queries I think have lesser importance. If it really was important, they will probably contact me again.

I have given up on my ambitions to have a "clean desk"...

Genuinely, have you considered leaving? You don’t have to work in a place that makes you so unhappy.

> closing Slack and opening it 2-3x a day

This is what I do and I don’t have adhd or anything like that. It’s necessary to get things done in this modern age

You should be that person who is not reachable. You need to set boundaries. Otherwise you are going to fall in the classic catch-22 of talking about the work and getting none of that work done. That's fine if you see your job as a paycheck. It's not so fine if you actually find meaning in your work and want to make forward progress.

> I don't want to be that person that's not reachable but more and more, I'm thinking about closing Slack and opening it 2-3x a day.

Looks like you already know the way forward, tell your team that you will be checking slack regularly but on your own schedule. If they protest, tell them to grab a copy of Deep Work by Cal Newport.

mute everythin that you don't need to know and check slack only a few times a day, in pre determined times, like when you arrive, after lunch and before living.

A person that is in a hurry will call you. It will not send a message.

Check it a couple times per day.

Don't check it in the morning. First check after lunch.

It's good! 2 times is good, 4 times is max. One as you arrive (put yourself as busy), one mid morning, one after lunch, one in the afternoon. A two to four hours delay is completely acceptable.

I'm challenged for 40 years with loosing myself, living above the clouds, focusing heavily on things that fascinate me, procrastinating everything else until pressure kicks in and abusing whatever Dopamine stimulating stuff comes in my way. When I was a kid nobody knew about ADHD. Some Open Source communities are on Discord (SolidJS, Axum) which is challenging for me every time I need to engage. Just reading through the stuff shifts my brain into ADHD mode. Discord is a distraction machine. Slack the same. At my workplace I'm the only person who has MS Teams *only* open for meetings. People who know me are contacting me via E-Mail for years (I read 2-3 times a day), but when I leave it open I get all kinds of spontaneous calls, notifications, etc. that I interpret as a sign that my colleagues aren't organised very well anymore. The whole Office365 suite is creeping into our company and kills peoples ability to focus or being productive. For people like us who actually *feel* the extend to which those new tools (Office365, Slack, Discord) are damaging the performance of teams and the wellbeing of every individual this trend is alarming.

My advice (mostly some general stuff), that works well for me and might help you a bit if you're not already doing this:

- Avoid to much sugar and caffeine. This is tough because it boosts our ability in the short term but kicks us above the clouds (or idle mode) after. So, best is to avoid sugar at all and reduce / control caffein. Of course no alcohol or other drugs. Cold showers really help to get started instead of 3-4 cups of coffee (me).

- Restrict your Slack time to defined time slices. Talk to your boss and team. I really recommend doing your focus work in the morning. First 4 hours of the day to do focus work. In the second half of the day do organisational stuff including reading through slack, etc.

- I'm doing Yoga Nidra for over 10 years and it restores my energy and ability to focus. Any relaxation technique should work. You might look for Andrew Huberman NSDR (Non Sleep Deep Rest) tracks or similar. For me, Pomodoro Technique works well. In the 30 minutes break I do Yoga Nidra. Andrew Huberman's podcasts about this stuff are amazing, but also a great source of distraction, of course. If I should recommend one podcast then it would be the "Focus Toolkit".

- We need to avoid distractions at all costs. Our minds are jumping after every little conscious or unconscious excitement kick. So, for your (let's say 2-4) productive ours, all this stuff needs to be shut out. Including your phone.

Last: There's been a large study that comes to the conclusion, that "a wandering mind is an unhappy mind". I find that's absolutely true. That means for us highly distractible earthlings our live goal should be seeking calmness and to do this to perform systematically actions that lead us to calmness, like doing relaxation and focus training every day.

Founder with ADHD here! I ran into this issue a bunch at my previous job as well. The notifications were always going off and detracting me from doing the actual work. There were two things I did, and do now, that have worked for me:

1. Similar to you, I muted my notifications and opened slack a few times a day.

2. I paired up with someone else to focus on the task at hand (like with Double[0]). I was able to ignore the pings, if they came through, because I felt more accountable to the person I was on the line with than the pings.

Your mileage may vary on these, so I would definitely encourage a bit of experimentation!

[0] https://doubleapp.xyz

Lol. Self plug without the disclaimer. Shame.

I'm not thrilled with the plug but he makes sense. It's good advice.

Set your slack notifications to email then you have async control to follow up in between work.

Just gotta make sure that email notification is turned off or you're gonna be back in notification hell.

> Im thinking about closing Slack and opening it 2-3x a day.

Seems like an obviously good idea.

Just close slack.

Get your deep work in.

When you need a break, open it back up, address DMs and such, then...

Close it.

That sounds like an absolute nightmare.

Is your management chain aware that you are diagnosed with ADHD? Staying off Slack should be considered a very reasonable accommodation for your condition. Perhaps go ahead and do it, but also tell them why, and how it will improve your productivity.

Alternatively maybe it's time to look for a different job with a more appropriate working environment, one that doesn't lead to such stress. How have you found previous jobs, in terms of being able to focus?

> Is your management chain aware that you are diagnosed with ADHD

No, and I don't think it will help, to be honest. They will just start paying even more attention to my work and decide it's not worth it.

If you’re in the US, I would request a formal reasonable accommodation from HR with your medical evidence. This establishes a paper trail in the event they attempt to terminate you due to your medical condition. My recommendation would be to codify the expectations around response time and Slack interactions in writing as the accommodation.

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/odep/program-areas/employers/ac...

https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/fact-sheet-disability-dis...

Once you need to start worrying about paper trails, your life within the corporation will have become an utter nightmare. Sharing medical information with your employer should be an absolute last resort, which isn't where OP appears to find themselves (given that muting notifications and checking it every once in a while is on the table).

It sounds like OPs life is already an utter nightmare there. Can only go up after getting some relief.

> I can't concentrate at all. It's not like it's annoying, I simply cannot work. I have been spending 10x more energy since I started to just keep above the water but now, after 10 months, I'm simply drowning and my tickets are all piling up.

How depressing to think one shouldn't ask their employer for an accommodation for a legitimate medical condition after almost a year of suffering 8+ hours a day. More empathy please.

I would never do that. You get marked as someone who requires special accommodation. Adhd is one of those things that only come up every now and then.

Yes, but then you get special accommodation. Accommodations that, y'know, help you manage and deal with getting your work done.

Honest question, does this actually help? I avoid disclosing my ADHD now because others at work have either started to treat me like a drug addict, tried to help but have a ton of misconceptions about ADHD, or started to treat me like a child.

The only positive responses have been from people who have it. But it doesn’t help for workplace accommodations.

Pause notifications for 30 while you do pomodoros. Works well for me

Can you get used to just not checking things? disable the counter and notification icon on slack? I would have 20k unread emails just because the vast majority are not important at all. People lost their minds when they saw that and I reealized that it wasn't normal. I just did good work so I got away with a lot and my manager definitely gave me cover and reminded me of very important things. ofc that depends on having a solid manager

Same with slack messages. If it's not super important I learned to just not pay attention to it or get to it when I have nothing going on.

I know you already did this but I aggressively leave slack channels, especially the "fun" ones. I can see plenty of cats and boomer memes on the open internet, and showing up in the office once in a while pays way more social interaction dividends than the cheap virtual interactions on fun slack channels.

Try looking for fully remote asynchronous companies. Comes with a different set of challenges for someone with ADHD, but companies with a culture that is more focused on asynchronous communication tend to work better with the high/low levels of focus that come with ADHD. I think if you're regularly getting pinged by people beyond your direct team, it's a sign of mismanaged culture.

having the same problem, also Slack/Teams UI is (visually) way too bloated. Using something cleaner like iMessage and IRC is helping me a lot, but this is unfortunately not possible all the time so i open up Teams only twice a day and pepole should call me if there is a urgent case.

tl:dr; turn off the notifications and proritise your workload so you know that the stuff you are clearing is the important stuff first, tell the company you are doing this to focus on your backlog.

This is going to come across as arrogant, and in a way it is, but in a healthy way.

If your tickets are piling up then you /need/ to ignore distractions. Someone then tries to track you down so you lead with 'is it on fire?' and when it is, ok that does rank highly, but when it's not 'sorry, I've got so much backlog I need to focus on right now, email me and I'll look at it as soon as I can, but fair warning, it might take a while' is not only ok, it's absolutely critical. In a very strange turn of events you'll likely see that somehow these critical problems are being solved at the source.... ;)

This also means that the workload you have and therefore the time you allocate to spending doing it has to be priority driven. Start with the flames and work back to the embers.

Finally, just to reinforce the main point here, if the tooling you've been provided with isn't enabling you to do your job well, then find how it will and tell the company what you plan to do to ensure productivity.

:) remember, they hired you to make them money, if you find a better way of making money faster and for longer only an idiot will find fault with that. This is how good ways of working evolve in environments.

Mute all but the critical channels, turn off notifications for the app, only check in predetermined times slots like every half hour. Adjust if you get pushback for not being available

As someone who has a similar issue with the MS teams/email divide...

Tldr: reduce reactivity and context switching. It will leave you exhausted and feeling like you are not making progress long term.

Chunk, at predetermined times for a set period. Scan information channels in a set order first, broadly sort into topics. Go through each topic and extract relevant detail/actions into a separate personal log on the topic.

Tl: One thing that is often overlooked is how this way of working puts you in to a hyper-reactive mode, taking you away from the things you had originally wanted to tackle at the beginning of the day. It is procrastination, it is your brain looking for an excuse to do something else. This will stoke the belief that, despite best intentions, you get distracted, can't work on the things you need/want to do and fail to make meaningful progress leaving you feeling tired and that you've fallen behind.

For me (read: maybe for you too, maybe not) what works is checking those channels at predefined intervals throughout the day (as you suggested) but having a prioritised list that you stick to in which ones you check, for how long, and follow that list each time. While going through, write a task oriented summary of the actions you need to take. If the information is more status/contextual/fyi on a particular thing, have a diary/log for that particular thing where you are updating you knowledge/understanding/the status of that particular thing.

For example: I'm working on a complex project right now where there are 10 separate countries all doing similar but different things across several technology stacks. Most of this is over email, so things easily get lost in a sea of email headers and signatures. Similar but different issues in different countries get mixed up. It's hard. Even without ADHD. First I generally sort all emails into folders or with labels by topic. Then I'll go through each topic separately and copy out the relevant detail and append it to a running document on that particular thing with details of who said what and when.

You can do this low tech, but I like to use obsidian to markup and further link info on things/concepts/people/dates so I can search across it later.

I hope this helps someone.

And for god's sake, turn off ALL the notifications you can!

Put a note in your status starting 'if it's urgent, call'. This is an entirely reasonable request.

Good luck

Not an advice for OP but Slack’s focus on user engagement is why we chose Zulip. Initially we tried Microsoft Team on a premise that this kind of software should suck enough to justify using it only for important stuff, but Teams is way beyond just “software that sucks”.

Zulip is manageable and feels like work without turning into some non-stop UX circus.

Are you located in the United States? If so, consider requesting an accommodation under the ADA.

Americans have really run out of problems I see

Ask for a reasonable accommodation for your disability that doesn’t require you to be on slack.

This is not a difficult problem. I block off time on my calendar for “Deep Work” from 2-3 hours at a time, change my status to “Doing Deep Work” and quit slack and Outlook.