Slack is great, but it's also terrible. It's much better than email at talking to people, but it's also a distraction machine. This isn't an original thought, but it's certainly something that bothers me like it bothers the rest of you.

Do not disturb exists in the app already, and that's okay, but it's completely manual and it's quite what I'm looking for.

What I want is to be able to go into a "focused working" mode in Slack where it still notifies me of things, but it only sends notifications on a reduced cadence, like every 10 minutes. This will let me stay up to date with things as they happen in Slack, but will spread out the distraction a bit so I'm not seeing notifications every few seconds while a thread I was involved in blows up as I'm trying to work.

Obviously I could go on DND for 30 minutes or an hour, but sometimes that's too long to go without seeing things, and it's totally manual, so I need to set DND for 30 minutes, then see what I missed, and then manually set it again. This "focused working" mode would automatically bundle my notifications together every 5, 10, or whatever minutes as long as I had the mode active.

I really like this idea, and maybe it's just a feature for me, but I really like the idea of having something in between, "alert me of every little thing immediately" and "don't make a peep for a long time".