A woman I lived with needed daytime teevee in the background all the time for her to focus on homework. It was like a background-radation level of irritation that shoved her mind away from wandering.
I use frequent interruptions. It's fashionable to call it a "pomodoro timer," after one blogger talked about how they used a tomato-shaped cooking timer to give himself an interruption every half-hour.
- every X minutes (blogger used 30, I use 60), an alarm goes off
- stop what you're doing; stand up, look away, long enough to "lose your train of thought"
- return, pick up where you left off
I find I get stuck on side-quests and tangents, and this interruption shakes me out of it. I'll do one short chore that has an end-condition: five basic stretches, or wash what's in the kitchen sink, sweep the floor, water the plants, etc, before I return. If I don't remember whatever I was doing when I was interrupted, then it wasn't important.
(wait, isn't this like the intermissions during monday night anime?) ( :3c )