The Phenomenon
Some people crush it when they're in a course, at a job, or following someone else's agenda - and then do almost nothing when the day is theirs. Full free day, clear list of things to do, and somehow the hours evaporate. One task in the morning, then drift. Or nothing until 9 PM, then a guilt-fueled burst.
This isn't a willpower problem. It's a scaffolding problem.
Psychologists call it the difference between externally-regulated and self-regulated behavior. When you're in a course, the structure is provided: someone tells you what to do, when to do it, and you just show up. Your brain's executive function barely has to work - the environment does the heavy lifting.
At home, alone, with no schedule and no one watching? Every single task requires you to make a decision: what to do, when to start, how long to spend on it, and what comes next. That's not one decision - that's dozens. And research on self-regulation failure shows that each of those micro-decisions depletes the same cognitive resource you need to actually do the work.
The result: you spend your mental energy choosing and have nothing left for doing. Removing distractions doesn't fix this - because the problem was never distraction. It was the absence of structure.