Protect People's "Focus Time" from Distracting Notifications Automatically based current Task/Timer

[nelsonic]

The biggest issue I personally have with chat¹ clients/apps is that they are an interruption/distraction "machine" that give people "instant gratification" at the expense of long-term meaningful work. While some chat clients allow you to update your "status" to inform other people that you are "busy" this is not done automatically and is a "crude" mechanism for communicating.

Chat should Automatically Sync with Active Timer/Task and Mute Notifications to Avoid Distracting the Person Doing "Deep Work".

Story

As a person using chat I want my contacts to be automatically informed that I am currently working on a task And to not expect an immediate reply and avoid interrupting my "Deep Work".

I want the permissions determining who can/cannot see the exact title/description of my task to be configurable.

Task/Todo

• [ ] Allow people using Chat fine-grained rules on when they should be notified of new messages:
  • [ ] Don't notify me when I'm working on a task that requires focus
  • [ ] Accumulate notifications for when I finish my task (stop the timer) to avoid distracting me.
  • [ ] Notify me immediately if the message is from this list of people
  • [ ] Notify me immediately if the issue is marked as Priority-1 or they mark the message as "Urgent".
  • [ ] Give each person in the team a "Quota" of "Mark-as-Urgent" privileges or a "Three Strikes" policy so people do not abuse the power to interrupt others. (please create a separate issue for this)
• [ ] use the "Time" (RealTime) API to "listen" to what task the person is working on and display both the name of the task and the estimated remaining time to colleagues who the person has granted "view current task I'm working on" access to.

Yes, we could just use the Slack "Presence and Status" API and update the person's status in Slack when ever they start/stop a task/timer but A. we would quickly reach API Rate-limits https://api.slack.com/docs/rate-limits when our App is even modestly successful.
B we have no control over the UX in Slack so we cannot make the status more prominent or display that the person estimated that a task would take 25mins and they have 5 mins left on the clock.

¹Chat clients refer to "real-time" or "instant" messaging applications. I have not found a chat client that integrates seamlessly with my Todo List or Task/Time Tracker and seamlessly/automatically informs people when I am unavailable.

[newswim]

Excellent, just to reiterate the point -- having to "manually" decide whether I should interrupt a co-worker to ask a question takes a lot of mental effort in the moment. It isn't good "DX" and simply knowing I can wait 5 minutes to ask something "guilt-free™" would be a boon.