Research figures drawn from peer-reviewed and primary sources cited on each page; verified April 2026. Your mileage will vary by team and context.
"The medium is the message."
Nine out of ten "productivity tool" comparison lists are written by sites that are affiliated with, partnered with, or advertiser-supported by the tools they rank. Atlassian writes about Jira. Salesforce writes about Slack. Microsoft writes about Teams. The result is that Slack and Teams are universally praised and never honestly criticised for their out-of-the-box defaults, even though those defaults are actively harmful to knowledge-worker focus.
This page is written by Digital Signet, an independent consultancy. We have no partnership or affiliate relationship with Slack Technologies, Microsoft, or Atlassian. We can say what the other comparison sites cannot: the default settings of Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Jira are designed to interrupt you, and that is a deliberate product decision.
Slack's out-of-the-box configuration: every channel you are a member of sends desktop and mobile notifications for every message. Every @-mention triggers a separate notification. Direct messages trigger a sound. The unread message count is displayed with a red dot in the Dock/taskbar. The mobile app pushes to your lock screen.
This configuration converts every Slack message into a Class 3 interruption (see interruption taxonomy): unplanned, urgency-signalling, and arriving at the worst possible moment for whoever receives it. An engineer with 30 Slack channels (typical for a 200-person company) can receive 50-100 notification triggers per day at default settings.
The business model reason is explicit in Slack's investor documents: the company measures engagement via daily active users, messages sent, and "channel activity." A Slack that users spend less time looking at is a Slack with lower engagement metrics. The interruption pattern is the product, not a side effect.
The fix: Mute all channels except one or two critical ones. Set Do Not Disturb windows that overlap with deep-work block hours (9am-12pm at minimum). Change the team agreement to "DMs are for urgent-only questions; everything else goes in threads." Use Slack's scheduled message feature so your own messages do not interrupt others outside of their communication windows.
Portfolio: slackcost.com covers the organisational cost of Slack's default interruption culture in detail.
Teams combines Slack-style instant messaging with Outlook calendar integration, which means notifications compound. The default configuration produces: chat notifications for every message in every team and channel you are a member of, @-mention notifications (both Teams and email), meeting-start reminders at 10 minutes and 1 minute, activity feed notifications for reactions and replies, and badge counts on the taskbar icon.
Teams has a particular compounding effect for Microsoft 365 organisations: Teams notifications, Outlook notifications, and Azure DevOps / GitHub notifications (for engineering teams) arrive via different channels simultaneously. An engineer at a Microsoft-stack organisation can face 100-200 notification events per day at default settings.
The improvement: In 2024-2025, Microsoft added Viva Insights integration that provides "Focus time" calendar holds and meeting-load analytics. Teams also added "Quiet time" settings that suppress notifications during designated hours. These are genuine improvements. They do not change the default; you have to opt in. But they exist and they work when configured.
The fix: Enable Quiet hours in Teams (Settings > Notifications > Quiet hours). Mute all channels except explicit follow-list channels. Disable email notifications for Teams activity (Teams and email overlap here catastrophically at default). Enable Viva Insights Focus time if your organisation licenses it.
Jira's default notification configuration emails every member of a project when an issue is created, updated, commented on, assigned, transitioned, or mentioned. For an engineer on three active Jira projects at a 50-person company, this generates 200+ notification emails per day. Most are noise: a status transition to "In Review" is not something that requires the attention of every person on the project.
The notification settings in Jira are configurable but complex: they live in project administration panels, can be set at the project or scheme level, and are frequently misconfigured during project setup. The result is that most Jira deployments run on the default notification scheme because reconfiguring it requires Jira admin access that most engineers do not have.
Linear, the popular Jira alternative for engineering teams, has better defaults: notifications are more targeted by default and easier to configure. But the same principle applies: unconfigured, the notification frequency is higher than what most engineers need.
The fix: Have your Jira admin configure a minimal notification scheme: only @-mentions, issue assignments, and blockers. Unsubscribe from all projects where you are not directly responsible for current work. Configure Jira to send a daily digest email rather than individual event emails where possible.
Email done right is Class 1 (batched async) - the lowest-cost interruption class. Email done wrong is Class 3. The difference is entirely in how you configure the client and how the team uses it.
The two configurations that convert email to Class 3: (1) desktop notification banners that appear immediately when a message arrives and are readable without opening the app; (2) preview text visible in notifications, which means the reader processes the message content even while "not checking email." Both are default-on in most email clients.
The fix: Turn off all email notifications. Check email at two or three dedicated windows per day. If your organisation requires faster response than this, the solution is to make that explicit ("urgent? DM or call") rather than leaving email on interrupt mode.
Individual notification hygiene helps, but team-level policy is more effective. A one-page document that leadership signs and the team agrees to:
Slack, Teams, and Jira will not change their default notification behaviour to be attention-respectful by default. The reason is structural: their revenue and engagement metrics correlate with notification frequency. A Slack that sends fewer notifications is a Slack with lower DAU engagement scores, which is a Slack with lower enterprise contract renewal rates.
The incentive is not malice; it is misalignment. Slack's metric is engagement. Your metric is productive output. These metrics are in tension, and the product is optimised for Slack's metric by default. Culture change happens team-by-team, not tool-by-tool. See the interruption taxonomy for the policy response.