I think many of us, including myself, often find ourselves distracted while doing a job on computer. The distractions could range from checking email, IM, checking RSS feeds of latest news or getting sucked into google mode and continuing browsing, in detrement to the work at hand.

Personally I get most distracted with great ideas popping up while trying to implement something. I used a MindMap product, however even that is getting huge.

Katie Hafner of New York Times has an interesting article on the topic.

It appears MS is doing some serious work on this:

In related work, other Microsoft researchers are developing software that can learn to gauge where and how a computer user is directing attention, part of what they call the Attentional User Interface project.

One piece of software in development learns to assign a level of urgency to incoming e-mail messages while shielding people from messages they can see later - based on an assessment of how busy they are.

"We can detect when users are available for communication, or when the user is in a state of flow," said Eric Horvitz, a senior Microsoft researcher who directs the project.

My bag of tricks are simply to close the email client (not the local mail server which keeps collecting them in the background), all IM clients, all extraneous applications including RSS readers. And then once I am concentrating hard the distractions seems to magically vanish. Apparently they are most when I am doing something I don't particularly like. However sometime that lands me in trouble when the period of email downtime is large :) Its a judgement call.

The article is an interesting read…wait I got mail!