I started listening to Ikigai before my vacation in Spain. One of the things the book talks about is flow, and removing distractions to be focused and present in the moment.

Vacations are a good moment to revisit routines and rethink or reset behaviors. I decided to look into removing distractions.

An easy thing to do was to pause work apps on my phone. This is less radical than removing them. If I want to use them, I can unpause them without having to download and install them again. I will not get notifications and checking Slack on my phone has now extra friction because it will ask me to unpause the work apps first.

The second thing I did, was not for work and I am very happy about it. Let me explain it.

This is a scenario that happens to me often: Let’s say I am cooking and I notice I am running out of olive oil. If you are from Spain, olive oil is essential, there is no cooking without it. So I will immediately grab my phone to add it to the shopping list.

When I grab my phone, by default I check email and messages. I know I don’t have to, it is muscle memory.

I will then reply to a message, forward one email to the Todoist app, start reading that newsletter that I really like, and then, what was I going to do? I forgot!

I go back to cooking, remember about the oil and hopefully this second time I am more focused, use more willpower and add olive oil to the list.

This will happen several times while I am running around doing house chores, with something I remember I need to add to the calendar, a note of something I want to send to my mom, a reminder for some school activity etc, etc.

I could modify how things are set on my phone but it takes time and maintenance and let’s face it, the phone apps are carefully designed to grab you and hold you tight.

So I started using my Field Notes notebooks instead of grabbing the phone and then batching adding the notes to the corresponding app.

It is working really well and I love using the Field Notes with the cover that my husband got me.

I can do more of something I like and removing the wasted time on distractions plus the time gained with batching largely covered the overhead of writing things twice.

Field Notes are manufactured in the US, the paper comes from the Midwest, the headquarters are in Chicago. It is a brand you can be proud to use.

My cover is from Hide and Drink. It fits a pen and stays close even with a pen inside. I thought it was too big when I got it but I am used to it now and I like having the pen inside.

The pen is from Muji. The ink is Waterman mysterious blue.