If you're having trouble staying focused, what helped me tremendously was to start maintaining what I call a 'distraction record' during the important tasks. N

If you're having trouble staying focused, what helped me tremendously was to start maintaining what I call a 'distraction record' during the important tasks. Now, it's not based on any scientific paper/literature. It's just a spreadsheet with the following columns: 'Time' , 'Important Task' , 'Distraction' , 'Time Since end of Last Distraction' , 'Distraction Duration' Each time you stop doing the important task and do something else (like browsing hackernews or checking your IMs) enter a new record with the minimum distraction duration being a minute. After a while you'll really start paying attention to how much time you lose doing unimportant things just to avoid the discomfort of the important task and how it actually drags on the time you spent trying to finish what you started.