In a world of lottery tickets and gamification it's pretty easy to imagine software crafted to steal attention from us.

Slack is synchronous, it's built around notifications and always on-ness (though their default do not disturb settings were a great improvement). It's also become a bit mandatory.

Many email dominated businesses moved to slack. That's an actual qualitative increase in synchronous communications. At least email could be paced.

Things totally get rediscovered all the time, but if everyone is saying the same thing at the same time, it does feel like something's off...