Have you ever turned on your mobile with a specific goal in mind and ended up being distracted by emails, chat, work up to the point of forgetting the initial purpose? It happens to me all the time.
My most time-impacting distractions start when I read wikipedia. This is where my curiosity can get me lost of hours. For example, I learned (i.e. clicked and read the full article) about Synesthesia while reading about Billie Eilish.
The second category is information distraction (aka the news distraction), and I do not mean only the BBC/CNN type of distraction, but also the emails, slack etc… When that little red dot indicating an update makes me lose minutes by the dozen.
Current remedy experiments
###curiosity distractions
Curiosity distractions I manage by considering them personal pleasure, like reading a fiction book. So during work hours, I will NOT open Wikipedia (hard, hard)
news distractions
I try to read content that I can control, or that I will actively try to influence. Should I read a full article on the rise and fall of the FTSE when I do not have shares and will not buy any in the short term? NO.
Should I read all the emails/messages about a project, I am only on the sideline, no. But if I get escalated to, then yes.
Anyway, this is work in progress, please share your methods :)