I hate instant messaging for anything that's not urgent. We should get back to using email more often, where I only check it once or twice a day. Non-urgent notifications still pull my focus, make me grab my phone, and totally destroy my flow state... Yet we've normalized it.

I've said it time and time again, and I'll keep saying it: Just use Postgres for everything. It's versatile, reliable, handles it all, and there's an extension for basically anything you need.