I am fascinated by technology, yet I long for a quiet, peaceful life. This dual interest led me to draw insights from both camps and experiment with mindfulness practices with the 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.
It’s been a very personal journey, but a big part of it has been professional as well. I like to sit in silence when I can, but I’m also a tech designer and entrepreneur. I lead a partial product team that builds mindfulness technologies remotely from a laptop, so I know the struggle of finding a balance with too much tech.
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 on and you’re swimming in emails, notifications and demands. Here are some of my favorite tips for mentally fine-tuning ways to engage with tech at work.
1. Redesign your work environment
Recently, I had a big project that demanded a lot of attention. It was hard to even imagine, knowing all the requests that would grab my attention on any given workday. I lightened my power load by installing my second computer monitor on a swivel and placing a large, comfortable 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 the back and see nothing. I sit on the wrong side of my desk and type on a wireless keyboard without a trackpad. I can’t access my email, social media, and web browser. And they cannot reach me.
Tech makers aren’t the only ones who can take advantage of the power of design. My physical setup gives me the resistance I need to get into the flow without too much effort. I could not redesign the operating system, but I could redesign the room in which it runs.
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 at my desk as much as possible. If I want to check something, I’m forced to politely excuse myself and walk to my desk. Less convenient, but just enough friction to keep 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 clean out 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 evenings or early mornings and I feel like I need to catch up. On top of that, I like to take the time to give people thoughtful responses to prevent downstream conflicts and misunderstandings. I even try to add something to each message that will make the recipient smile.
Mentally considering how tech affects your state of mind will help you make similar skillful adjustments to accommodate it. yours Quirky habits and idioms.
At the end of the day, I check my email one last time, but I try not to send a reply. If I do, I’ll rummage through what I’ve sent and be sure to check for responses in the evening. And if I do get an answer in the evening, instead of satisfying me, it’s usually sneaking up in my office late at night.
This tip is not necessarily for everyone. This is a value I have discovered about myself. Mentally considering how tech affects your state of mind will help you make similar skillful adjustments to accommodate it. yours Quirky habits and idioms.
3. Reject false urgency
In both personal and professional information channels, there’s a destructive illusion that makes the tech path more stressful than it should be: false urgency. Work messaging becomes much more serious when you customize it to deliver the information with an appropriate level of urgency.
Consider how important your current settings are, versus how urgent they are needed.
For email, team messaging, calendar alerts, project notifications, or any other information channels, you can consider how important your current settings are compared to how urgent they are needed. An alert on your phone informing you that a critical system just failed. The same caveat is unnecessary for a random email that can easily wait until tomorrow.
It also helps you manage quickly with your team. Still at Monkey, we have a communication charter that outlines how promptly we expect each other to respond: emails are guaranteed a response within two days, work done within a day, a text within a few hours, and calls promptly. When we tag someone in a document, we don’t expect them to see it unless they’re actively in the file. Not only does our charter protect the attention of receivers, it also prevents senders from anxiously waiting for immediate responses on an unsupported channel.
If you’re frantically refreshing your inbox, slowing it down can be a pain. It will get easier as you build new habits and your team develops new expectations. Rejecting false urgency frees up a lot of mental energy for focus, creativity, deep thinking, and effective collaboration.
4. Use wisely
You can use AI apps to collect and collate ideas quickly, but at least for now, you need to verify facts, trim redundancies, and edit for clarity and authenticity. For many tasks, AI is more like cruise control than autopilot. You still need to run.
By now you’ve probably seen an AI agent join a video call, listen to the entire meeting, and then email everyone a quick summary. But did you really read the synopsis? Probably not, unless edited by a human who understands the full context that actually matters.
Things are evolving quickly in this space, but as a rule of thumb, I recommend that it takes no less time for you to create something than it does for others to engage with it. If this happens, respect your recipient’s attention by spending a little more time reading and improving it yourself. Chatgut feels something about finishing a 10-page report in two minutes and reading others in depth when you’re not distracted.
Your work may look very different from these examples. It’s all good. People are diverse, and things change over time. The bottom line is that a mindful relationship with technology is about paying close attention to how different tech affects you and using that insight to experience fearlessness in your life.
Excerpt from Reclaim Your Mind: Seven Strategies for Making Tech Mentally Enjoyable By Jay Vidyarthi, published by Still Up Press. Copyright © 2025 by Jay Vidyarthi.
