I’m fascinated by technology, yet I yearn for a calm, peaceful life. This dual interest led me to draw insights from both camps and experiment with a mindful way of being with tech, not against it. For my entire adult life, I’ve been trying to figure out how to live mindfully and love technology at the same time.
This has been a very personal journey, but a big part of it is professional, too. I love sitting in silence when I can, but I’m also a tech designer and entrepreneur. I lead a fractional product team creating mindfulness-related technologies remotely from a laptop, so I know the struggle of finding balance with tech more than most.
It’s not easy to do your best work, think deeply, and be creative in this attention economy.
It’s not easy to do your best work, think deeply, and be creative in this attention economy. It’s even harder to stay grounded when the pressure is high and you’re swimming in emails, notifications, and demands. Here are a few of my favorite tips to mindfully fine-tune the ways you engage with tech at work.
1. Redesign Your Work Environment
Recently, I had a big project that demanded a lot of focus. It was hard to even imagine, knowing all the requests that pull at my attention on any given workday. I reduced the burden on my willpower by installing my second computer monitor on a swivel and putting a big, comfy chair on the other side of my desk.
Now, whenever I need to focus on something (including as I type these words), I rotate my second monitor to face backward with nothing else visible. I sit on the wrong side of my desk and type on a wireless keyboard with no trackpad. I can’t reach my email, social media, and web browser. And they can’t reach me.
Those who create tech aren’t the only ones who can leverage the power of design. My physical setup provides me with the constraint I need to get into a flow without too much effort. I couldn’t redesign the operating system, but I did redesign the room in which it operates.
This mindset also helps me park my phone outside of work hours. When I’m at home with my family, I try to leave it charging on my desk as much as possible. If I want to check something, I’m forced to politely excuse myself and walk over to my desk. Less convenient, but just enough friction to prevent me from habitually reaching for Slack or my work email while my six-year-old is trying to play with me.
2. Be Intentional With Email
When I start my workday, the first thing on my calendar is a block of time to clear my inbox. I do this for a few important reasons.
First, I don’t have work email on my phone, so I don’t see messages in the evening or early morning and feel like I need to catch up. On top of that, I like taking time to respond thoughtfully to people to prevent downstream conflicts and miscommunications. I even try to include something in every message that might make the receiver smile.
Mindfully noticing patterns in how tech influences your state of mind will help you make similar skillful adjustments to accommodate your unique habits and idiosyncrasies.
At the end of the day, I check my email one last time, but I try not to send any replies. If I do, I’ll ruminate on whatever I sent and compulsively check for replies in the evening. And if I actually get a reply in the evening, instead of satisfying me, it usually ends up with me sneaking back into my office late at night to follow up.
This tip isn’t necessarily for everyone; it’s a nuance I’ve discovered about myself. Mindfully noticing patterns in how tech influences your state of mind will help you make similar skillful adjustments to accommodate your unique habits and idiosyncrasies.
3. Reject False Urgency
Across both personal and professional information channels, there’s one destructive illusion that makes tech way more stressful than it needs to be: false urgency. Work messaging becomes much saner when you customize it to present with an appropriate level of urgency for the information being conveyed.
Consider how urgent your current settings are, compared to how urgent they need to be.
For email, team messaging, calendar alerts, project notifications, or any other information channels, you can consider how urgent your current settings are compared to how urgent they need to be. An alert on your phone notifying you that a critical system just failed makes sense. That same alert is unnecessary for a random email that can easily wait until tomorrow.
It also helps to manage urgency with your team. At Still Ape, we have a communications charter that describes how urgently we expect each other to reply: Emails warrant a response within two days, work messaging within one day, a text within a few hours, and calls immediately. When we tag someone in a document, we don’t expect them to see it until they’re actively in the file. Not only does our charter protect receivers’ attention, it also prevents senders from anxiously waiting for immediate replies on a non-immediate channel.
If you’ve been frantically refreshing your inbox, it might feel pretty uncomfortable to slow down. It’ll get easier as you form new habits and your team builds new expectations. Rejecting false urgency frees up a lot of mental energy for focus, creativity, deep thinking, and effective collaboration.
4. Use AI Wisely
You can use AI apps to gather and assemble ideas quickly, but at least for now, you need to pause to verify facts, trim the excess, and edit for clarity and authenticity. For many tasks, AI is more like cruise control than autopilot; you still need to steer.
By now you’ve probably seen an AI agent join a video call, listen to an entire meeting, and then email everyone an immediate summary. But did you actually read the summary? Probably not, unless a human being who understood the full context edited it down to what actually matters.
Things are evolving quickly in this space, but as a rule, I recommend making sure it doesn’t take you less time to create something than it will for others to engage with it. If it does, respect your recipient’s attention by spending a bit more time reading it and refining it yourself. Something feels off about having ChatGPT whip up a 10-page report in two minutes and expecting others to read it in-depth when you didn’t even bother.
Your work might look very different from these examples. It’s all good. People are diverse, and things change over time. What matters is that a mindful relationship with technology is all about paying close attention to how different tech affects you and using that insight to fearlessly experiment in your own life.
Excerpt from Reclaim Your Mind: Seven Strategies to Enjoy Tech Mindfully by Jay Vidyarthi, published by Still Ape Press. Copyright © 2025 by Jay Vidyarthi.
