Well I'd like to hear more about how it has failed for you, then! I mean, this sounds like an interesting proposition to approach in its own right.

I find there's a certain paradox in the fact that we're probably all here on Hacker News and Reddit during our workdays, so we're mostly slacking. The question of why we slack and how to slack less (or whether we should slack less) is deep, relevant, immediate, and not covered really by this advice.

The first problem with distraction I think we could call the Train Problem -- unrelated to the trolley problem in ethics. This is the problem that you need a higher-order reflective process to 'switch tracks', so that your brain is like a runaway train on the track of distraction even though you literally have every opportunity to un-distract yourself. Flipping a switch and jumping on a track to the right destination just requires a little bit of oomph to do it, and the only reason why Wikipedia and webcomics and news sites are so distracting is because we forget to have this moment of "oomph" to pursue something better.

I've started to think of it this way: that the basic unit of will is Resolve. And resolve is as simple as choosing a future that you have somehow committed to moving forward. It's the moment that you say "I am getting married to her" but before you have set the date, or decided where, or proposed, or anything of that sort. You switch mental contexts to take something new for granted. In the philosophical sense, I suppose, we would say that you choose to believe something new. But I prefer to think of it as a database-driven programmer: we're talking about your brain querying itself, independent of the world it models. A resolve occurs when you make your brain return new, different results.

There's a subtler aspect which philosopher John Searle calls "the continuous causal gap" -- the sense in which you can resolve to think of yourself as a French-learner, but there is another resolve needed to take your first lesson, and then more resolve is needed to continue the lessons, and then you have to resolve to visit France and immerse yourself, and so on. It's a continuous gap of times when you need to "shift tracks" when you could have chosen not to shift them. The initial resolve only functions to guide the future ones -- "I am the sort of person who is learning French" just makes it easier to say, "what should I do today? Go to my French lesson." So there are mini-resolves every day which we've got to also consider.

But while this gives a useful view of the problem, it doesn't answer it. What went wrong, in your experience, with the trick of "starting off pointed in the right direction"? What did you need in order to "break free" of distractions -- what sort of system is conducive to reminding us to have these higher-order reflective processes where we can say, "yeah, I should really switch tracks, right now, at this instant"?

(I'll give you an example of something which makes it much harder: tabbed browsing. Closing a tab to signify the end of one distraction brings up immediately another distraction which I said I "would get to." Another thing which makes distractions on Hacker News more tempting is the knowledge that they will expire, so that if I do not read it now, I might never read it.)