I don’t think this guy is crazy. Knowledge workers nowadays are constantly bombarded with information, and if you’re not careful, you can spend an entire day messaging instead of building cool stuff.

Next, I’m gonna to share some Google products that have “snoozing” and “bundling” features; however, I think in general, all communication apps will become more complex and adopt snoozing features that help users prioritize their communications at various degrees of asynchrony:

• Hangouts lets you snooze notifications for 1, 4, 8, 12 hour time periods, letting you stay focused during crunch time.
• Inbox lets you snooze or bundle messages to only come in once per day, and with a little bit of organizing, free up your inbox for Priority work.

Actually now that I think about it, someone very clever could probably get #slackbot to do this today? For every channel, create a “channel-digest” channel and slackbot could manage the summaries and when to send them. If you’re on the core team, follow the channel. If you’re on a peripheral team, follow the digest.

Just a thought.