So I had to do a ticket in office today, I started it and within two hours I finished it. This work was estimated for a week or more. I couldn’t believe what had happened. I submitted a pull request, deployed code to our testing server and only in mid day I realized I had never turned on Slack.

When Slack or any other messenger is turned on you are conscious about it. You expect someone to ping, this anticipation slows you down, drains some part of your cognition. When someone pings your attention moves, and rather than check the ping, you also check other channels and stuff. Then your brain stars to think in various pathways, your concentration is drawn out away from solving the issue.

I turned on Slack, there was a pull request comment, though it was minor I think I took kind of 4 hours because I was looking at messages and interacting etc.

If one has to be productive, I strongly recommend turning off Slack, Zulip, Rocket Chat, Telegram, WhatsApp or any other messenger, finish your task and then check distraction stuff in your slack time. But yes this does not work for all, many of you are paid to respond to distractions you get professionally, but for those who can be productive, be productive.