I’m fascinated by expertise, but I yearn for a relaxed, peaceable life. This twin curiosity led me to attract insights from each camps and experiment with a aware approach of being with tech, not in opposition to it. For my whole grownup life, I’ve been making an attempt to determine stay mindfully and love expertise on the identical time.
This has been a really private journey, however an enormous a part of it’s skilled, too. I really like sitting in silence once I can, however I’m additionally a tech designer and entrepreneur. I lead a fractional product workforce creating mindfulness-related applied sciences remotely from a laptop computer, so I do know the wrestle of discovering steadiness with tech greater than most.
It’s not straightforward to do your greatest work, suppose deeply, and be artistic on this consideration economic system.
It’s not straightforward to do your greatest work, suppose deeply, and be artistic on this consideration economic system. It’s even more durable to remain grounded when the stress is excessive and also you’re swimming in emails, notifications, and calls for. Listed here are a number of of my favourite tricks to mindfully fine-tune the methods you have interaction with tech at work.
1. Redesign Your Work Atmosphere
Not too long ago, I had an enormous challenge that demanded quite a lot of focus. It was onerous to even think about, figuring out all of the requests that pull at my consideration on any given workday. I decreased the burden on my willpower by putting in my second pc monitor on a swivel and placing an enormous, cozy chair on the opposite aspect of my desk.
Now, at any time when I must deal with one thing (together with as I sort these phrases), I rotate my second monitor to face backward with nothing else seen. I sit on the fallacious aspect of my desk and kind on a wi-fi keyboard with no trackpad. I can’t attain my e-mail, social media, and net browser. They usually can’t attain me.
Those that create tech aren’t the one ones who can leverage the facility of design. My bodily setup gives me with the constraint I must get right into a stream with out an excessive amount of effort. I couldn’t redesign the working system, however I did redesign the room by which it operates.
This mindset additionally helps me park my cellphone outdoors of labor hours. Once I’m at residence with my household, I attempt to depart it charging on my desk as a lot as doable. If I need to verify one thing, I’m compelled to politely excuse myself and stroll over to my desk. Much less handy, however simply sufficient friction to stop me from habitually reaching for Slack or my work e-mail whereas my six-year-old is making an attempt to play with me.
2. Be Intentional With Electronic mail
Once I begin my workday, the very first thing on my calendar is a block of time to clear my inbox. I do that for a number of essential causes.
First, I don’t have work e-mail on my cellphone, so I don’t see messages within the night or early morning and really feel like I must catch up. On high of that, I like taking time to reply thoughtfully to folks to stop downstream conflicts and miscommunications. I even attempt to embody one thing in each message that may make the receiver smile.
Mindfully noticing patterns in how tech influences your way of thinking will provide help to make related skillful changes to accommodate your distinctive habits and idiosyncrasies.
On the finish of the day, I verify my e-mail one final time, however I attempt to not ship any replies. If I do, I’ll ruminate on no matter I despatched and compulsively verify for replies within the night. And if I really get a reply within the night, as an alternative of satisfying me, it often finally ends up with me sneaking again into my workplace late at evening to comply with up.
This tip isn’t essentially for everybody; it’s a nuance I’ve found about myself. Mindfully noticing patterns in how tech influences your way of thinking will provide help to make related skillful changes to accommodate your distinctive habits and idiosyncrasies.
3. Reject False Urgency
Throughout each private {and professional} info channels, there’s one harmful phantasm that makes tech far more traumatic than it must be: false urgency. Work messaging turns into a lot saner once you customise it to current with an applicable stage of urgency for the data being conveyed.
Think about how pressing your present settings are, in comparison with how pressing they have to be.
For e-mail, workforce messaging, calendar alerts, challenge notifications, or another info channels, you possibly can contemplate how pressing your present settings are in comparison with how pressing they have to be. An alert in your cellphone notifying you {that a} vital system simply failed is smart. That very same alert is pointless for a random e-mail that may simply wait till tomorrow.
It additionally helps to handle urgency together with your workforce. At Nonetheless Ape, we now have a communications constitution that describes how urgently we count on one another to answer: Emails warrant a response inside two days, work messaging inside someday, a textual content inside a number of hours, and calls instantly. Once we tag somebody in a doc, we don’t count on them to see it till they’re actively within the file. Not solely does our constitution defend receivers’ consideration, it additionally prevents senders from anxiously ready for speedy replies on a non-immediate channel.
Should you’ve been frantically refreshing your inbox, it would really feel fairly uncomfortable to decelerate. It’ll get simpler as you type new habits and your workforce builds new expectations. Rejecting false urgency frees up quite a lot of psychological vitality for focus, creativity, deep pondering, and efficient collaboration.
4. Use AI Correctly
You need to use AI apps to collect and assemble concepts rapidly, however at the least for now, that you must pause to confirm info, trim the surplus, and edit for readability and authenticity. For a lot of duties, AI is extra like cruise management than autopilot; you continue to must steer.
By now you’ve in all probability seen an AI agent be part of a video name, take heed to a complete assembly, after which e-mail everybody a right away abstract. However did you really learn the abstract? Most likely not, until a human being who understood the complete context edited it right down to what really issues.
Issues are evolving rapidly on this area, however as a rule, I like to recommend ensuring it doesn’t take you much less time to create one thing than it is going to for others to have interaction with it. If it does, respect your recipient’s consideration by spending a bit extra time studying it and refining it your self. One thing feels off about having ChatGPT whip up a 10-page report in two minutes and anticipating others to learn it in-depth once you didn’t even hassle.
Your work would possibly look very completely different from these examples. It’s all good. Persons are numerous, and issues change over time. What issues is {that a} aware relationship with expertise is all about paying shut consideration to how completely different tech impacts you and utilizing that perception to fearlessly experiment in your individual life.
Excerpt from Reclaim Your Thoughts: Seven Methods to Take pleasure in Tech Mindfully by Jay Vidyarthi, revealed by Nonetheless Ape Press. Copyright © 2025 by Jay Vidyarthi.
