+100, this problem with popular chat services has irked me for a long time too. Anything that forces you to be constantly monitoring the chat stream synchronously is annoying. Some people can do that and still get deep work done, but I can't. I much prefer async chat, be it email or reddit/hn or some other attempts like Atlassian's erstwhile chat client. Always glad to see new attempts at solving this problem, thanks cq2 team! Will be following the project.