Indistractable and the calendar your task app can't see

The argument, in one paragraph

Indistractable (2019) relocates the problem. The phone is the instrument of distraction, not the cause; what people are usually escaping is a small discomfort in the task itself: boredom, difficulty, the fear of doing it badly. So the durable fixes are internal, and the external tactics (app blockers, notification pruning) only work once you have decided what the distraction is pulling you away from. Eyal wrote Hooked, the book on building habit-forming products, and this one reads as its counterweight: the defence written by someone who knows the offence.

Timeboxing from values, not tasks

The book's scheduling method starts somewhere no task app can: your values. Block time first for the domains a to-do list never captures (the people you live with, your body, your own attention) and only then fill the remainder with work. The point of the order is definitional: nothing counts as a distraction until you have decided what it interrupted. An evening with no plan cannot be protected, and a wasted hour cannot even be identified.

Where the book disagrees with automatic scheduling

Diarized only ever sees tasks somebody typed into a task app, which means it sees work and nothing else. Left alone with a free evening, it will fill it, because the calendar showed those hours as free and nothing on it said otherwise and no task app records that Thursday nights are for your family. Eyal's ordering is a real gap in every task-driven scheduler, and the remedy in ours is entirely manual: put the rest of your life on the calendar yourself, as ordinary events. Diarized treats existing events as immovable and schedules around them, but only the ones that exist.