There are many paths to a calm, meditative state in your digital life.
Here are my humble suggestions towards digital zen. Please comment to share your own tips. Let's help each other find a path to enlightenment.
Read or unread, it's still on the table. Archive it. A clean digital table is the starting point of becoming a digital zen master.
Most powerful tip that has helped me is keeping inbox at zero. Null. Nada. Every time I check my mail, I should have enough time to clean it.
Earlier I thought this was impossible. Then I discovered my dear friend . A strict inbox zero policy with Boomerang and generous use of my Google Calendar as a todo list significantly reduce my digital anxiety.
Other email apps I use include Rapportive. It keeps me from opening tabs to find contextual information about the email sender or recipient. Most often I tend to use the possibility to follow the person at Twitter directly from Gmail.
Occasionally, I also use Yesware to know when my emails are opened. It's not pretty and I tend to keep it turned off, but it has been handy a couple of times.
Workflow
As I mentioned, I use my Google Calendar as a todo list for items that I'm not doing during the next four hours. It's far from perfect, but gets the job done better than any list-based todo list I have tried.
For the next four or so hours, I write my todo list from calendar to nowdothis.com. I also use a notebook with a hand-drawn productivity matrix, writing down every item as either urgent-important, not-urgent-important, urgent-not-important or not-urgent-not-important.
Insight, ideas and reading
I use Kippt to save and share relevant links I haven't read yet. I also sync many of these links to my Instapaper. I love to read all the items shared to me, so I encourage my friends to send me everything that might be insightful to me. I have been trying out using a shared Kippt folder feed named "Johannes" with an IFTTT recipe to let my friends share the links they think I should read directly to my Instapaper and vice versa. So far, it's something of a success. If you want to join in to this test, drop me an email.
At Instapaper, I use likes to send items to my Evernote through another IFTTT recipe. However, I'm definitely not using Evernote at its full potential. This is because I'm in love with the simple Dropbox syncing iPad notebook called Plaintext.
I open Instapaper only in the evening and at the gym, keeping the hard-core longform stories and articles from interrupting my workflow during the day. Of course, I use Scoopinion a lot, often sending longer articles to Instapaper.
During the day, for example after lunch and during coffee breaks, I tend to relax reading the mid-length topical stories from quality magazines. My new personal favorites, discovered via Scoopinion, are Mother Jones and Smithsonian magazine.
Please comment if you know of additional or better ways of reaching digital zen. Let's end virtual anxiety once and for all.