Thanks! Agreed that talking to people is on a whole distracting but necessary. We think the problem is that not all daily updates, design and eng discussions and announcements need to be immediately talked about. The problem with chat is it's a time/recency based system. Patchwork attempts to separate out immediate discussions vs async instead of all of it being in chat.

Fundamentally too much communication interferes with doing real work. No amount of technical solution will fix what is essentially a social problem. The original post states the headphone rule: This is not a rule generally respected very well within actual offices, because people overestimate their own importance and the importance of their problems.

Fundamentally, other people and their communication should be ignored and regimented to specific parts of your day or week (depending on your role). You can do this with slack, email, phones, this tool. Simply turn off the notifications. Within the office you can only do this by having a door that can be locked, which is generally not available.