How do you deal with endless work notifications?
What do you suggest for managing tool distraction? Slack, Jira, Notion, email, etc. all blow up at once, and it feels like I can’t keep up. Are there any best practices I should know about?
The most common recommendation for dealing with notification overload is to define your deep work hours and turn off notifications during this time. However, this ends up limiting the wrong thing (deep work hours). So, instead, I always recommend the reverse of this:
Box in your sync hours so the rest can be defaulted to deep work
What does this look like in practice? For me, I set aside the first 30 minutes and the last 30 minutes every day for sync catch-up. During this time, my team members know they can reach me immediately. I check and respond to messages in various tools like Slack, Notion, and email.
Any message I receive that would take less than 5 minutes to answer gets an instant response. For anything that would take more than 5 minutes, I save it to a separate folder so that I can do the work it requires during my deep work time without having to deal with remembering/finding it later.
However, I will immediately mark it with a 👁️ emoji to let the sender know that I have seen the message and am working on it. If I think it will take longer than a business day, I also add a note about when they can expect to receive a response.
There are many variations in the length and frequency of this approach. Choose a variation that makes sense for your work.
The Boxed Sync approach offers tons of benefits, including:
Making it clear when team members should expect an instant response from you - Despite media headlines, overwork is a much bigger problem than underwork on remote teams. Remote team members default to thinking they must instantly respond to "prove" they're working. The problem is that this leads to excessive context switching, which kills their productivity and burns them out. Setting clear response expectations upfront keeps you from falling into this common trap.
Saving you time through batching - Responding to a single message as soon as it comes in is as efficient as washing one piece of clothing at a time. You're spending a much larger cumulative amount of time on notifications than you would if you would batch checking them. You'll also save mental energy when you stop letting notifications constantly interrupt your deep work.
Keeping you from being in reactive mode all day - Instead of letting notifications direct your day, you can prioritize what actually matters. Less mindless reaction, more intentional activity. Don't be a captive to the tool. The default notification settings are built to keep you using the tool as much as possible. Set up personal boundaries and change the default settings to avoid falling into this black hole. My free Slack Hacks guide is a great place to start.
Don't fall for any "best practice" that involves adding more tools. That's very rarely the answer. Instead, focus on the key foundational elements:
Filter: Change the default settings to suit your needs
Streamline: Consolidate as much as possible
Constrain: Set up the Boxed Sync approach
These steps will help put you back in the driver's seat so you can do your best work.
