Has any workday ever felt like a constant stream of interruptions? Three months ago, my team and I were facing something very similar. Regardless of how hard we tried to be productive, the onslaught of pings and notifications and the fear of missing out placed everyone’s productivity at risk. Out of desperation, we tried something that felt almost blasphemous in today’s interconnected society: we attempted to block Slack for dedicated periods of each day.
To say the results were shocking is an understatement. Allow me to walk you through our experience and the findings from cutting off the digital noise.
The Digital Terrorscape We Lived In
Our workdays were dominated by a notifications-at-rhythm hellscape—constantly fighting apps for attention while stuck in deep work—before our experiment began. Every couple of minutes, a new notification would arrive, making it even harder to concentrate deeper. From Slack messages, emails, and text messages to app alerts, everything together formed a quicksand of micro-disruptions.
Research indicates that after an interruption, it takes around 23 minutes for someone to fully refocus. With notifications arriving in set intervals, we were functioning below our cognitive peak. One team member confessed to me that they had not experienced a true flow state in months.
It was remarkably easy for me to fall into a frustrating loop: checking Slack, working for five minutes, and checking Slack again—this made no sense, since there was no need to check Slack, but the cycle had become a habit.
The Design of the “Slack Blocked” Experiment
Rather than going cold turkey, we took a more structured approach:
- Two 2-hour “deep work” blocks, each day from 10am-12pm and 2pm-4pm, were designated as Slack-free zones for email and Slack.
- Clear “emergency” protocols were established (phone calls only for life-and-death situations).
- An app to measure focused versus interrupted work time was utilized.
- Work time was tracked through an already existing app during the one-week commitment to the experiment. More on that later.
- Experiences were shared every day in a communal journal, which greatly encouraged participation.
Along with the ease of sharing experiences comes the challenge of possible slacking. To combat the notion of laziness during the experiment, automatic responses detailing focus blocks along with expectations of turnaround times were added.
The Unanticipated Outcomes
To acknowledge, the first day was challenging. The Controlio time tracking app that tracked our focus time showed many of us still habitually reached for Slack 15-20 times during the blocked periods! But by day three, something remarkable started happening.
We noticed our focus sessions becoming even longer. Tasks that previously required an entire day’s worth of effort were finished within a single focus block. Team members attributed feeling less mentally fatigued at day’s close relative to the amount of work completed.
What stood out the most? A 37% increase in completed tasks with the experiment week compared to the previous weekly average was measured as the most significant finding. Overall code quality had improved, the writing underwent fewer edits, and more creative solutions were produced.
It was not only the productivity increase that surprised us, but, quite the opposite, the work quality improvement. Uninterrupted focus time allowed us room to breathe and tackle our best-thinking challenges.
The Unforeseen Hurdles
Everything was not perfectly crafted, though. A few unforeseen problems appeared:
- Delegated decision bottlenecks: Some decisions that would take no more than a few minutes to resolve with Slack took half a day as everyone needed to wait for the next communication window in order to share thoughts verbally.
- Anxiety spikes: A subset of team members went through genuine anxiety in the first few days, always worrying about what they could be missing during blocked time.
- Meeting creep: In the absence of quick solutions via Slack, we started noticing a pattern of scheduling more meetings, which aimed to resolve previously chat-based issues.
In this case, we improved the approach instead of abandoning it. Per the 20 best employee time tracking apps & software in 2025, the “adjusted focus time” structure is said to greatly help employee performance. Focused work is proven to increase employee efficiency, but implementing time frames when everyone must work in focus mode does fall into the dictate category. Often, organizations requiring structured focus time need 2-3 weeks to adapt the workflow and culture in sync.
What We Do Differently Now
Now we have integrated modified Foundation blocks as a permanent part of the workflow.
- Each employee will have one 90-minute focus meeting every day.
- Each team member can reserve personal focus slots using a shared calendar.
- We have slow response hours where Slack is allowed, but participants are informed responses may take 1-2 hours.
- We have shifted from addressing single topics per message to addressing multiple topics in fewer messages.
Culturally, we have changed the most. As a firm, we do not expect answers within minutes anymore. Rather, we mark focused work time as a valuable asset.
Wrap Up: Achieving Harmony in a Hyperconnected Age
Our experiment taught us that the solution isn’t abandoning communication tools but rather putting them in their proper place. Slack isn’t the villain—rather, it is our unexamined habits of constant connectivity that are the issue.
By providing boundaries toward deep work while effective communication still remains, we have achieved equilibrium as a team. Productivity is up, stress is down, and perhaps most importantly, people genuinely appreciate their work now.
If your team is inundated with a never-ending stream of notifications, consider a scaled-down version of our experiment. Start with one hour of blocked communications each day, evaluate the outcome, and calibrate based on what you discover. When given the opportunity to concentrate, many teams can exceed expectations.
