Contextual Notification

Here’s what I want, right. I want—most of the time—to check my emails and Slack/Teams messages three times a day: first thing, lunchtime and last thing. Those times are Comms Time, in-between them is Work Time. No notifications—they make me anxious—and no flicking over to check Slack and get distracted—which risks me getting pulled into a conversation and losing whatever focus I had. This is how I try to work and mostly it's ok.

The trouble is, there is often a biiiit more crossover between the two kinds of time than I would like. When there’s one last bit of info I need from someone before I can crack on with work (but they’ve not answered my message before Work Time)  orthere’s an email with important info I forgot to copy out and put in the Trello card for the task that I want to check but I know I'll see all the new emails and get dragged into something.

OK, that second one is just my mistake, and I just need to remember not to do that. The other one, though—while, in general, I’m opposed to intrusive notifications of almost any kind—the exceptions being timers that I have set, and phone calls, which almost always have some kind of time-sensitivity, I would like contextual notifications—to be able to mark a conversation on Slack or an email thread as a “notify-me” conversation, so that I can get pinged for that specific thing and get on with work.

I had a look at Zapier to see if I could jury-rig something there but the integration doesn't seem to allow for that kind of thing—there's only a "when you receive a message on all private channels" which isn't really what I'm looking for. I'm sure the apps themselves won't ever do this for me, but if anyone wants to try and build something like this, I'd definitely be interested.

(I'd try and build it myself but I'm trying to be a bit more realistic about taking on projects like this!)