Around 34 I started noticing that Slack was making me stupid. Not because of the platform — because of what I had trained myself to do with it. I would check between meetings, between paragraphs, between bites of lunch. Each check was a millisecond of decision-making about whether anything required my attention. Nothing usually did. But my brain was doing that low-grade compression work all day.
The experiment: I turned off every notification, badge and sound. I opened Slack only three times a day — morning, right after lunch, and 20 minutes before I logged off. I did not tell anyone I was doing this.
Nobody noticed. Not a single person raised the alarm that I had gone silent. Two people said in DMs later that they had appreciated a specific detailed answer I sent, and now I realise those detailed answers only existed because I was reading my Slack in a focused hour rather than in 40 five-second glances. Turns out the quality of my responses had been directly proportional to how much time I spent on them, which was directly proportional to how present I was when I opened the app.
Two years later this is still my default. Nothing has broken. The one lesson: nothing on a company Slack requires your attention within 30 minutes. Anything urgent enough to require faster response is not on Slack.