I’m fascinated by know-how, 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 total grownup life, I’ve been making an attempt to determine the way to stay mindfully and love know-how on the identical time.
This has been a really private journey, however a giant 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 battle of discovering stability with tech greater than most.
It’s not simple to do your greatest work, assume deeply, and be inventive on this consideration economic system.
It’s not simple to do your greatest work, assume deeply, and be inventive on this consideration economic system. It’s even more durable to remain grounded when the strain is excessive and also you’re swimming in emails, notifications, and calls for. Listed here are a couple of of my favourite tricks to mindfully fine-tune the methods you have interaction with tech at work.
1. Redesign Your Work Setting
Lately, I had a giant undertaking that demanded loads of focus. It was exhausting to even think about, figuring out all of the requests that pull at my consideration on any given workday. I lowered the burden on my willpower by putting in my second pc monitor on a swivel and placing a giant, comfortable chair on the opposite facet of my desk.
Now, each time I have to 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 improper facet of my desk and sort on a wi-fi keyboard with no trackpad. I can’t attain my e mail, social media, and internet 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 supplies me with the constraint I have to get right into a movement 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 telephone exterior of labor hours. After I’m at dwelling with my household, I attempt to go away it charging on my desk as a lot as attainable. If I wish to test 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 E-mail
After 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 couple of necessary causes.
First, I don’t have work e mail on my telephone, so I don’t see messages within the night or early morning and really feel like I have to catch up. On prime of that, I like taking time to reply thoughtfully to individuals to stop downstream conflicts and miscommunications. I even attempt to embrace one thing in each message that may make the receiver smile.
Mindfully noticing patterns in how tech influences your mind-set will aid you make comparable skillful changes to accommodate your distinctive habits and idiosyncrasies.
On the finish of the day, I test 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 test for replies within the night. And if I truly get a reply within the night, as a substitute of satisfying me, it normally finally ends up with me sneaking again into my workplace late at night time 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 mind-set will aid you make comparable 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 anxious than it must be: false urgency. Work messaging turns into a lot saner whenever you customise it to current with an acceptable stage of urgency for the knowledge being conveyed.
Take into account how pressing your present settings are, in comparison with how pressing they must be.
For e mail, workforce messaging, calendar alerts, undertaking notifications, or every other info channels, you’ll be able to take into account how pressing your present settings are in comparison with how pressing they must be. An alert in your telephone notifying you {that a} important 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 along with your workforce. At Nonetheless Ape, we have now a communications constitution that describes how urgently we count on one another to answer: Emails warrant a response inside two days, work messaging inside at some point, a textual content inside a couple 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 rapid replies on a non-immediate channel.
In case 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 loads of psychological vitality for focus, creativity, deep considering, and efficient collaboration.
4. Use AI Correctly
You should use AI apps to assemble and assemble concepts rapidly, however not less than for now, you want to pause to confirm information, 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 have to steer.
By now you’ve most likely seen an AI agent be a part of a video name, hearken to a whole assembly, after which e mail everybody an instantaneous abstract. However did you truly learn the abstract? Most likely not, until a human being who understood the complete context edited it all the way down to what truly 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 would 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 whenever you didn’t even hassle.
Your work would possibly look very completely different from these examples. It’s all good. Persons are various, and issues change over time. What issues is {that a} aware relationship with know-how is all about paying shut consideration to how completely different tech impacts you and utilizing that perception to fearlessly experiment in your personal life.
Excerpt from Reclaim Your Mind: Seven Strategies to Enjoy Tech Mindfully by Jay Vidyarthi, printed by Nonetheless Ape Press. Copyright © 2025 by Jay Vidyarthi.
