Problem
Unfortunately, not all the things you need to do come from yourself.
Daily, many requests come your way from other sources such as emails and, increasingly, chat, from professional services like Slack, Discord, etc., but also through popular applications like WhatsApp, Telegram, Messenger, etc.
Because every platform is different, you must adapt your behavior depending on which service the request comes from.
For example, when you receive an email that you feel is unimportant and want to reconsider later, you may use the Snooze functionality. This functionality will make the email reappear after some time.
Other platforms like Slack and Discord do not provide a Snooze functionality. The alternative is to mark or "star" a message, using this feature to create an "inbox" of messages, or to use the feature most team-based chat services offer: Mark as Unread.
Unfortunately, marking a message as unread because it is not the right time to process it is not ideal because it will shield you from all future communication coming through this channel.
Hence, this is one of the major limitations of single-threaded communication such as one-on-one chat.
Even worse, some services, mostly personal chat such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Messenger, Secret, etc., do not allow you to mark a message as unread.
Those services consider that you cannot un-see them once they have been seen.
Scenario
You are focused on working on a document when you see a Slack notification.
You open the notification and see your colleague asking you to review something she just did.
Unfortunately, you are focused on something else and cannot be disturbed now. You mark the messages as unread!
A few minutes later, this colleague tells you the company's main service has suffered a major technical problem. You are the only one with the credentials to restore the service.
Unfortunately, you cannot see those messages because you have not "consumed" the first message.
What could you do to better manage incoming requests?
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