The Distraction From My Ideal Day

One distraction has been quietly pulling you away from what your ideal day actually looks like. It's easy to miss what's underneath it, and that's a question we can explore together.

Hi {{ first_name | friend }},

Earlier this June, I was sitting at Lazarus Brewing with a fellow coach, telling him life lately had felt like pushing a boulder up a mountain. I wanted my day-to-day to flow more, to feel smoother. He asked me two questions: what does your ideal day look like? and what is pulling you away from it, and is it worth it?

I had answered the first one many times, when I started this journey as an entrepreneur and several times since, and the answer has barely changed. It opens with ten minutes of breathwork before I roll out of bed, a slow breakfast, some movement outdoors to get my energy going before the workday starts around nine thirty. Several hours of deep work follow, without my phone, without the pressure of a thousand and one things, my focus honed in enough that time disappears.

After lunch I get creative, writing or drawing or walking out into the world to see what I notice. Then I guide a few selected clients through their own breakthroughs, close the day with movement, and share a home-cooked meal or a board game with people I love. The whole day feels like a deep, relaxed exhale instead of a retained inhale.

The second question was the one I had never sat with.

The next day, at Radio Rosewood, while I journaled, I caught myself mid-sentence picking up my phone to check if another text had arrived, then coming back to the page. I even caught myself thinking: why did I unlock my phone? What am I looking for? Every time my hand reached out I felt a rush, then frustration, because when I looked back down there was only one more sentence, a couple more words, and it had taken far longer than required to write them down.

The second question was answering itself in real time. Everything pulling me away that morning traced back to the same thing: my phone.

I was checking it often, either to respond to an active notification or to see if a new one had come in. Sometimes I lost track of time scrolling, using it as a mental break between two activities. Over time and through repetition, being on my phone had become a reflex, a way to fill any empty space, any pause, with more doing.

My first move was the obvious one: use the phone less. I started putting it out of sight when I sat down to work, in my bag rather than face down on the desk, far enough that reaching for it required standing up or bending over.

A few weeks later I was at Afuga, working on my call for papers submission for LASCON, the application security conference here in Austin. I had given myself a couple of hours. Every time I finished answering one of the questions on the form, I felt an itch in my hand.

Some of those times I caught it. Other times I found myself already bending sideways, rummaging through my bag for the device, and had to tell myself: not yet, we are not done with this deliverable. The two hours became three, but the submission went in.

The distance is what did the work. My phone being out of reach created a pause where the reach used to be, and in that pause a different question showed up: why am I losing focus right now? Why am I straying away? The answer arrived slowly, over weeks of the same pause repeating.

Some of the time it was simple. The work was hard, I could not see the end of it, and answering a text took a couple of seconds. My brain wanted the feeling of something completed, and the phone was the fastest place to get it.

Sometimes the reach had nothing to do with the difficulty of the work. I had been heads down for a while and wanted to know what had happened out there since I last looked, who had tried to get in touch, who needed something from me.

I had carried the reflex into my business and personal relationships.

My typical way of operating is distraction. Working on several things at once has always felt easier to me than working on one, and holding my attention on a single thing costs me more effort than splitting it across four, even though I know the switching is what burns energy.

Over the summer, I tried Sudoku, two or three grids a day, and my daily screen time dropped by an hour. I moved from level two to level four, and every jump made me a beginner again.

Inside a grid, struggling with what the last level had made easy, I never once reached for my phone. Filling one feels similar to solving a puzzle, where my thoughts settle like snow in a globe. When I close the book and open my laptop, I feel reset, calmer, and the phone stays away. It comes back a couple of hours in now, instead of minutes into sitting down.

PS — There's more than one distraction that can pull us away from what an ideal day looks like. Eleven years ago, in Toronto, the thing I couldn't seem to put down was my laptop. I'll save that one for the next newsletter.

Victoria Grandury
CEO & Founder, Limitless Rebel
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