I am addicted to Slack

I have a confession to make: I spend a lot of my time at work reading and posting to Slack. I don't even mean to do it, it just... happens. I'll be in the middle of some focus time and I'll alt+tab over "just to see what's happening" and get the little dopamine rush of answering someone's question or posting a funny GIF. It is killing my productivity and my ability to focus and on top of that, it's burning me out.

In some ways, this has been a strength of mine in the past. I learned a lot about what was going on in the rest of the business just by reading Slack and as a result, I knew exactly what was going on where and why. As my career has progressed though, I am finding it is getting in my way. I simply don't have time to get into the weeds on Slack and do my other work so it is something I want to work on.

This blog post is me figuring out how to do better on the fly. I'm going to try some of these strategies and see how they work for me. Maybe I'll do a follow-up in a few months and let you know how I got on.

Strategy 1: change my notification settings

An easy and practical one to start. I get notified way too much. That little "knock brush" sound makes me alt+tab over to Slack so fast it's unreal. So I think there's some work to be done here. I'm going to try the following: