I can recommend "Deep Work" by Cal Newport. Made me realize how distracted I am, and how much can be gained by focusing on "deep" work. A quick read, but describes the problem and coping-strategies well.
I've read "Deep Work" a month ago and by now it's single highest ROI on a HN-recommended book I've ever gotten. Not joking.
I know three weeks is not enough for the habit to make itself permanent, but those last three weeks were for me one of the most productive periods in the last several years. Something must have clicked for me in that book.
In particular, I finally stopped being afraid of the calendar - I now follow the idea of "scheduling every minute of your life", but treating that schedule only as a guideline - i.e. tasks you pre-plan to be doing, but can rearrange at any moment if you see the need. And at least for the last three weeks, that process alone pretty much single-handedly solved most of my procrastination issues :).
(Time to go off HN, btw., my break slot is coming to an end ;).)
The second point that helped me tremendously was on cutting out distractions. After reading the book I've made a resolution to unsubscribe from every newsletter that comes across my mailbox and to turn off any but most important push notifications. With my daily load of e-mail coming down from a hundred to just a few, I feel much less distracted and pretty much got over compulsive checking of the mailbox.
I've also went ahead and read Cal's other book, "So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work". I also recommend it strongly, it has some really good (and come to think of it, obvious) points about approach to work life.
Meta: something I found interesting about Derek is that he welcomes mail from anyone:
"Please email me at [...] for any reason. I reply to all, and much prefer email over social networks. "
It is. I can recommend it having read it a few weeks back.
I've also found helpful to use task systems that impose a hard limit on current work. I use a simple kanban table in org-mode and it works great to get me doing important stuff.
A great companion to "Deep Work" is "Hooked". The second is more of a how-to guide to developing products that become habit-forming. But in seeing how it's done, there's the potential to free yourself from it's grasp.
After reading these books, OP's article feels a little under-researched. Content aggregators like HN, Reddit, Pinterest, and Twitter are essentially using reality as a content generation algorithm. The content provided by reality is the variable reward component of the hook model shown in "Hooked".
It's not just that there's tons of information, it's that we're wired to seek novelty. This is also seen with pornography addiction, which is a more widespread phenomenon than most people realize, or admit.
From a product perspective, is it possible to take advantage of this wiring of the human brain to perform useful work? In other words, if we're wired to seek novelty, and we can create information products that are highly addictive, can we direct human attention to particular problems?
That's not to say that comment chains on Reddit don't provide value, but so many human hours of effort are spent glued to these novelty engines. It all seems inefficient, unpurposeful.
But then again, if the wheels of the economy keep turning, that's all that matters, right? Where are we headed?
