🧘♂️ My tips for your digital serenity
One of the great evils of our hyperconnected era is immediacy: notifications that interrupt our attention at any moment. They are sometimes useful, even essential, but treating them all the same way, with the same urgency, overloads our brain. Result: too many solicitations, too much input... and not enough calm to be efficient. Organizing your information flows can really help you regain serenity, mental clarity and efficiency.
Let's take the example of emails
We all know this situation: after a few days of vacation or a period of absence, you find an inbox with 100, 200 or even 500 unread messages. This apparent chaos generates stress – especially for fear of missing an important message.
Some simple best practices to lighten your mental load:
- Separate your personal and professional email addresses
Be rigorous: communicate the right address depending on the context. You can also create a "secondary" address to give in special cases, to avoid being overwhelmed by unwanted solicitations. - Use automatic filters (rules) in your email
Automatically classify recurring emails (banks, suppliers, administrations...).
These are useful messages, but not urgent, so there's no need for them to interrupt your ongoing tasks. - Manage your newsletters intelligently
They probably interested you at some point... but today?
➤ Automatically classify them in a specific "Read later" folder.
➤ If, over time, you see that they accumulate without ever being opened... unsubscribe! - Do not tolerate spam
If you receive unsolicited messages, report them as spam or junk.
Your inbox is a workspace, not a trash can.
Email is not a storage tool
Too often, emails are used as storage or archiving space. However, keeping all your important documents in your inbox means losing them in the mass.
In the past, we filed documents in folders by subject: advertisements had no place in these files. This logic must be reproduced today:
- Create clear folders by theme, for incoming (what you receive) and outgoing (what you send).
- Save important documents outside your inbox (in an organized space: drive, local directory, cloud).
- Archiving by year remains a good practice to avoid the chaos of "too much information, nothing findable" (the famous "too much to find").
Modern office automation does not exempt you from filing, structuring, organizing. It's even more necessary than ever.
In conclusion:
Better managing your information channels is not about reading everything faster.
It's about giving each message the attention it deserves, at the right time.
And it's also – and above all – giving yourself mental space.