Unrelated, but eliminating resources is an effective productivity/focus "hack" for me: - Disconnect the laptop's charger and work on one charge. I used to have

Unrelated, but eliminating resources is an effective productivity/focus "hack" for me: - Disconnect the laptop's charger and work on one charge. I used to have a laptop that had at most 2 hours and it forced me to really focus. The progress I made on some projects on a commute is amazing. - Disconnect from the internet and work only with what you have on your machine. This means no search, no tabs. No distractions. This is great for proofs of concepts/prototypes where you get something done first, then you refine it later. It taught me to look at the code instead of documentation, and it taught me that as good as a documentation can be, there always are things that are not documented but are still there to use. It also made me more familiar with the dependencies of my projects. I never really used StackOverflow much when online (I instead rely on the code, docs, and issues of the project), so your mileage may vary when it comes to removing internet access. It's also useful to reduce the "activation energy" for work. One of the ways to do that is to exploit the time you don't feel like working to play or explore. A directory named "musings" can help, where you scratch a few itches with snippets of code. If you're distracted in exploration of a new library or concept, make a new file and play with constructs, patterns, APIs, libraries, etc. Just play for play. It's low pressure. You don't need to ship something. It's not work, but it's fooling around and more often than not, it tricks you into getting in the zone without even realizing. The other benefit is that day in and day out, you're building a "corpus", a set of snippets that very often will come in handy when you actually need to do something "work related". When that time comes, you won't perceive the task to be daunting or be clueless, because it's déjà vu. You already fooled around with that concept/library/problem and you have something in your back pocket. It won't be "How on earth am I going to tackle this" and feeling under pressure and overwhelmed, but "Yup, I already played with that. Heck, I even wrote some code to do that. I'll see if I can use it". Playing when you don't feel like work is a great way to reduce the activation energy when you actually have to work.