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

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 set my notifications to "Direct messages, mentioned & keywords".

This way, you can keep it open and dip into whatever you need to but you'll not be swamped with millions of notifications.

I'd also go through all channels etc and mute or leave channels you're not actually required in any more.

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?

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"...

Mute the notifications. Or even just close slack. Break projects into tasks. Finish one task at a time, then check slack/email.

> 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)

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Do that.

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 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?

Check it a couple times per day.

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

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"

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.

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.

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 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.

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.