If you really like coding or writing, you shouldn't need to force yourself to do it.
I really enjoy eating, but if I'm caught up in something I don't always remember to do it. Sometimes I'll go hours past my regularly scheduled meal times. Then I'm sitting at my desk wondering (only for a short time) why my stomach hurts. Oh ya, food.
While this is a extreme example, the logic still applies to coding/writing or anything else. Sometimes the tasks you should do are side tracked by other tasks. And if you're deep in thought, you might not have the internal alarm to switch to something more of a priority. Hence external alarms.
But that's just me.
In the process of eating you have access to many choices. You have good food, you have junk food, and you have bad food.
Some people lack self control and discipline so they end up eating more junk food and bad food than good.
Same goes for the process of productivity. You have work, distractions, and hinderances.
If this is what you need to build up a habit of self control, then good for you. If not whatever.
But it also somewhat true. If I love music I would be playing my guitar every single day. Being a rockstar is sometimes both incidental and consequential.
I could have said it simpler by stating that one would be foolish to rely on emotions to schedule his/her day.
Building up on that, you can't control if the next task you have is going to be a tedious or smooth one. If you have a bug, or have to parse a CSV file in your assembly language program, then you just gotta do it. Sometimes there may be a way around it, but most often there isn't. Otherwise, you'd be able to circumvent the whole task in the first place.
You might think you like all ice cream, until someone hands you some anchovies ice cream or something.
It's a refusal to accept this that prevents people from completing tasks -- they hit the inevitable wave of tedium, and they can't grind through it, because they assume anything that's truly edifying will be tedium-free. That's a really dangerous belief.
Now if something is all tedium, then I agree, find something else to do. But there is no project on Earth that won't have frustrating patches where your mind will try to wander.
I do really like fishing and had a goal to do it each day but failed. I'm guessing you think I don't really like fishing after all?
The Wikipedia definition is "act of replacing high-priority actions with tasks of lower priority, or doing something from which one derives enjoyment, and thus putting off important tasks to a later time".
This clearly exists, and completely disavowing it with some (semi)feel good idea about how you aren't caring enough, implicitly linking it to low willpower is way too simplistic - and totally not insightful.
My own experience has been that even when I know that the task needs to get done, even when it is enjoyable, it can be hard to get started.
Once started, everything flows as you might expect, as the author says "How many things do I need to shed ... with extreme prejudice in order to singlemindedly focus on this one thing that I love?"
The post also neatly sidesteps the idea that even if you do not care, you may need to get things done.
The attitude probably appeals to some libertarian philosophy/Protestant work ethic, but even those people will freely admit that doing beats wanting to do something -- it's the doing that counts.
If people cannot get themselves to do something, even if they want and care to do it, telling people to care more isn't very helpful, especially when pooh-poohing the very things that work for some people to do what they want to do!
"If that sounds fancy and oversimplified, then you "care" about too many things. Period."
What if you really do not "care" about the things that you are doing while procrastinating? What if you are simply avoiding the anxiety of starting to do what you care about?
There are serious psychological questions here, and this blog post just ignores them all.
I wrote down Merlin's definition of procrastination: procrastination is what happens when you temporarily forget who you are, what you should pay attention to, and what your options are for doing something about it.
Do you need an alarm to remind yourself to play video games? Do you need a "distraction-free gaming environment"?
I rarely play video games, so that isn't the greatest example for me.
I'll present an analogy, though.
One of the long standing examples given of whether knowledge actually applies to actions is smoking. I think we all know that smoking can cause cancer, reduces lifespan, and causes various diseases.
Except that you can invariably see doctors smoking outside of hospitals, even oncologists!
Just saying that outcomes are the only thing that matters to make an evaluation of whether you care about something, or consider something a priority doesn't explain why we can have cognitive dissonance about them.
Your (and the author's) assertions are almost laughably behaviorist, completely neglecting any idea that people have minds and you are effectively arguing that people are reducible solely to action-machines.
We know better than that, unless you really think that the mind has no meaning, or that we are somehow rational machines - in which case, why the obsession with "caring" (which is clearly more emotional than rational)?
Basically, if the only way we can judge that we "care" about something is exhibiting behaviors that show we care, using these tools will exhibit that same behavior -- in which case, what does caring have to do with it?
Really, there is even more wrong with this post than I thought at first blush, and further analysis seems to reveal even more flaws with the thinking.
You might find something like this helps you, but you're not going to find that if you can't do it that this will change that.