Your phone lights up. You see a green message bubble. You unlock your phone. You check the message. You reply. You check some other notifications. Before you know it, 5 minutes have passed before you continue your work. Afterwards, you think about the sequence of what you believe were deliberate events. I chose to do that. Next time, I'll be a bit more careful. But processes like the one I described become automatic. Just like driving, a lot of the work doesn't require active thought. And thats why its so dangerous. Environmental cues may alter our behavior without our conscious awareness of it. It is important to recognize these influences and minimize the negative effects of them.
There have always been distractions, but the ones that exist today are a bit more subtle. Your behaviors are heavily influenced by context. Your brain takes in sensory information and stimulate common signaling pathways. Here are some common ones:
Studying at the library and cafe may be more productive than studying at home. Several factors contribute to this phenomenon. One is social norms. People are expected to get work done at the library, whereas that expectation may not be internalized at the home desk. At the home desk, a student can also be expected to have leisure activities like watching videos or playing games. There is also social or peer pressure in these environments; individuals may not appreciate someone playing video games at the library.
Additionally, many of the sensory cues are eliminated. You may take a laptop that you only use for work to the cafe instead of your desktop computer. You may silence your cell phone for courtesy sake. You are sitting on a rigid cafe seat rather than your comfortable home chair.
Day to day sights, sounds, and touches influence our behavior in compounding ways. We don't always recognize the automatic responses we have to these stimuli.
Make a note of the cues that stimulate unfavorable behavior. Remove phones and other distractions from the work environment. Delete distracting desktop icons and remove browser bookmarks.
It may be beneficial to change the environment completely instead of eliminating individual cues.
Do work at a place different from where you do leisurely activities, such as your backyard patio, dining table, or living room. You can stimulate different environments other ways. You can setup a different user account for your computer that does not have the same programs installed (video games, browsers) and reserve it for work only. Or, use a work dedicated laptop.