Having slack doesn't necessarily mean having to be reachable 24/7. Chatrooms fill the use case of day-to-day chat and other more short-lived information.
As for distractions, that comes down to bad work culture. Hacker News & Lobste.rs are far more distracting for me. I simply get around to slack/email when I get around to it, with the exception of my boss pinging me. Thankfully he only messages me for important things.
If you email me I'm going to assume it's something actually important / something that will have some longevity vs some question on slack. Since people wear headphones due to idiotic open workspace culture, messaging someone on slack is far easier than walking up to them (unless your question is actually important/urgent, of which most are not).
Your phone or video call better be very important. Those are blockers, especially video calls. I prefer to call the latter time-wasters since, well, they're almost always a complete waste of my time. The only useful video calls I've done are with syncing up with another developer, which I cannot do locally now that I work remotely. Aside from this I prefer leaving the luxury of video calls for my parents.
As for distractions, that comes down to bad work culture. Hacker News & Lobste.rs are far more distracting for me. I simply get around to slack/email when I get around to it, with the exception of my boss pinging me. Thankfully he only messages me for important things.
If you email me I'm going to assume it's something actually important / something that will have some longevity vs some question on slack. Since people wear headphones due to idiotic open workspace culture, messaging someone on slack is far easier than walking up to them (unless your question is actually important/urgent, of which most are not).
Your phone or video call better be very important. Those are blockers, especially video calls. I prefer to call the latter time-wasters since, well, they're almost always a complete waste of my time. The only useful video calls I've done are with syncing up with another developer, which I cannot do locally now that I work remotely. Aside from this I prefer leaving the luxury of video calls for my parents.