As far as distraction goes, you can just mute your notifications and be inactive for a while. Bring up a slack window from work, and keep up-to-date with work events while tabling discussions with your friends for the time being — move from sync to async.

Granted, I'm sure some people do have trouble shifting fluidly between sync and async. I don't really have a solution to that, but in practice it hasn't been a problem for me. Maybe if I had different coworkers it would be an issue.