I quit a few Slacks by removing them from my mobile devices. I never use the Desktop Electron app. None of them were work related, and I was a fairly active participant in all of them. They served as a virtual water cooler for fast-food type human interaction for times when I did not leave the house. Fast-food because it was no real substitute for real social interaction.

I would banter with the best of them. This is something that I still dream of doing well in real life situations like parties but it is easy in a virtual medium for me. I would also share, read way too many, and regurgitate interesting articles that were of interest to the people there and get a dopamine hit if it was liked.

After an initial one week period of really wanting to pop in to see what was “going on” and later to see “what I missed”, I don’t think I miss it. Yes, I may miss some very interesting intellectual and not so intellectual banter and even “under the radar” articles to post here, and I think the trade benefit of less distraction and more focus is well, well worth it.

To generalize, if you say that X is a distraction to you, get X off your phone. It is much, much harder to be sucked in with the mobile web experience than with their mobile apps. For Slack, it was sufficient to remove them as “teams”, and I dislike their pushing of a frictionless (re)team add. I can manage that though, especially since my desire to “pop in” to those water cooler Slacks decreased exponentially.