- Introduce a constraint: introduce a deadline, or unplug your laptop from the charger and do the work only on the laptop's charge (the urgency you get from this is amazing as you're up against the battery as its charge depletes), or disconnect from the internet and do the work only with the resources at your disposal: This is great because you don't have necessarily access to resources to "look up the best way to do something" and it pushes you to do the first draft of things (prototype, proof of concept, draft of a document) and not start editing before the first draft and getting lost. You can't get lost in Wikipedia's links because you simply are not online.

- Break down work into units, do one unit at a time: break out a book into chapters for example, and read one chapter at a time.

- Reduce the size of the unit of work: if you broke down the work into units (book into chapters) but still could not manage, then your unit is not a chapter, but it's a section. If you're still unable to do that, break it into a darn paragraph and just do one paragraph in each setting, but finish the unit, however small it is. You're not reading a book, you're reading this paragraph and it is the most important thing right now.

- Vow not to leave until you finish a unit of work: it takes you two hours to read a paragraph? I guess you're staying two hours, then.

- Select the day after's work the day before, or commit to do this thing and only this thing this hour (for example: during this hour, I will read and finish this article and that is the only thing I will do and nothing else). In other words, earmark specific time slots to specific work, even if you're freestyling and earmarking this next hour, to this arbitrary thing.