Nir Eyal argues you can't call something a distraction unless you planned to do something first. He recommends timeboxing over to-do lists because it teaches you how long tasks actually take and gives you feedback to plan better.
You can't say you got distracted unless you know what you got distracted from. So if I look at your calendar and there's a bunch of white space, it's empty. You can't complain because what did you get distracted from? You didn't plan anything to do. And saying, I have a to do list doesn't count. A much, much better technique is called timeboxing. I didn't invent it. It's been around for decades and decades, and it's simply the practice of putting down what you want to do and when you want to do it, not what you will finish. The goal of timeboxing is to see how much you can do in a period of time when you work without distraction. So what you're gonna do is you're gonna say, okay, I'm gonna work on this task for 30 minutes. Then I can say, okay, in 30 minutes, how much did I get done? And therefore, I can plan ahead how much time I need to finish the entire task. And this is one of the reasons that to do lists are awful. And timeboxing is way, way better because it has a feedback loop. It teaches you how long things take.
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