Bring Your Practice to Digital Work

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 conscious manner of being with tech, not towards it. For my complete grownup life, I’ve been attempting to determine the way to 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 like sitting in silence once I can, however I’m additionally a tech designer and entrepreneur. I lead a fractional product group creating mindfulness-related applied sciences remotely from a laptop computer, so I do know the battle 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 financial system. 

It’s not straightforward to do your greatest work, suppose deeply, and be artistic on this consideration financial system. It’s even tougher to remain grounded when the strain is excessive and also you’re swimming in emails, notifications, and calls for. Listed below are just a few of my favourite tricks to mindfully fine-tune the methods you interact with tech at work. 

1. Redesign Your Work Surroundings

Lately, I had an enormous venture 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 lowered 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, each time I have to give attention to 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 incorrect aspect of my desk and sort on a wi-fi keyboard with no trackpad. I can’t attain my electronic mail, social media, and internet browser. And so they 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 through 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 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 forestall me from habitually reaching for Slack or my work electronic mail whereas my six-year-old is attempting 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 just a few necessary causes.

First, I don’t have work electronic 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 forestall 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 frame of mind will enable you make comparable skillful changes to accommodate your distinctive habits and idiosyncrasies.

On the finish of the day, I verify my electronic 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 observe 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 frame of mind will enable 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 once you customise it to current with an acceptable degree of urgency for the data being conveyed.

Take into account how pressing your present settings are, in comparison with how pressing they should be.

For electronic mail, group messaging, calendar alerts, venture notifications, or every other info channels, you may take into account how pressing your present settings are in comparison with how pressing they should be. An alert in your telephone notifying you {that a} vital system simply failed is sensible. That very same alert is pointless for a random electronic mail that may simply wait till tomorrow.

It additionally helps to handle urgency together with your group. 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 in the future, a textual content inside just a few hours, and calls instantly. After 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 fast replies on a non-immediate channel.

In the event you’ve been frantically refreshing your inbox, it’d really feel fairly uncomfortable to decelerate. It’ll get simpler as you kind new habits and your group 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 Properly

You need to use AI apps to assemble and assemble concepts shortly, however at the very least for now, you could pause to confirm details, 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, take heed to a complete assembly, after which electronic mail everybody a direct abstract. However did you really learn the abstract? Most likely not, until a human being who understood the total context edited it all the way down to what really issues.

Issues are evolving shortly on this house, 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 may look very completely different from these examples. It’s all good. Individuals are various, and issues change over time. What issues is {that a} conscious 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 Mind: Seven Strategies to Enjoy Tech Mindfully by Jay Vidyarthi, revealed by Nonetheless Ape Press. Copyright © 2025 by Jay Vidyarthi.