Slack is where a small team thinks out loud. That is what makes it useful, and it is what makes it exhausting.
Every thread might be a decision. Most of them are not. You cannot tell which is which without reading them, so you read them all, or you stop reading and miss the one that needed you. Either way, the channel list sets your day the same way an inbox does.
Three kinds of thread
The sorting that works for email works here too, with one difference.
Threads that need your decision. Someone is waiting for you to choose. Which launch date. Whether the scope change is in. These are rare, and they are the reason you are in Slack at all.
Messages that need your answer. A DM from someone who is blocked. A direct question in a channel. The answer is usually not hard. It just needs to be written.
Threads that resolve themselves. Someone asks, someone else answers, the thread goes quiet. This is most of Slack, and the difference from email is that it is noisier while it happens. A thread can look urgent for twenty minutes and be finished before you open it.
That last category is where the time goes. Reading a thread that resolved itself costs as much as reading one that did not.
A routine that needs no software
This is what I did before Waveloom read my Slack. It works with Slack's own settings.
1. Mute more than feels comfortable. Keep notifications for DMs and direct mentions. Mute every channel you would only lurk in. You are not leaving them, just taking them off your notifications.
2. DMs first. A DM is almost always someone waiting on you specifically. Clear those before you look at any channel.
3. Read threads from the bottom. Open the thread and read the last message first. If it says "fixed" or "never mind" or has a checkmark on it, you are done. Only read upward if the end is still a question.
4. Answer where the team will see it. If a thread needs your decision, answer in the thread, not in a DM to one person. The next three people with the same question will find it there.
5. Give Slack a schedule. Set notification hours. Nothing about a small team's Slack is improved by a reply at 23:00.
6. Leave one channel a week. If you muted a channel and did not open it for a week, leave it. Someone will mention you if it matters.
This cuts most of it. What it cannot do is read the channels you muted and tell you when one of them changes from chatter into a decision that needs you. For that you still have to check.
What Waveloom does with it
Waveloom reads the channels you choose and your DMs, in the background. Channels you did not choose, it does not read.
Threads that resolve themselves never become cards. That is the main thing it does with Slack: it watches the question get answered and says nothing. When a thread does need you, you get one card with a line about why, like "Tomás is blocked until you choose between two launch dates."
For DMs, the card comes with a drafted reply. You edit it, approve it, and it posts in the DM as you. Nothing posts without that approval. For a thread in a channel, the card tells you where to look, and you answer in Slack where the team will see it.
Quiet hours apply here too. Cards still get created overnight, so the thread that needed you at 23:00 is waiting in the morning brief instead of on your lock screen.
What it will not do: post, react or move messages on its own, summarise every channel every day, or replace Slack. Everything it surfaces is still there in Slack, with the reply you approved.
The goal is not zero unread
"Unread" is Slack's metric, not yours. A channel full of unread threads that resolved themselves is a channel working as intended. The goal is that the few threads that need you reach you, and the rest do not cost you anything.
If email is the bigger problem, the same idea is in how to stop answering email all day. And there is more on how Slack cards work in Slack without reading every thread.