Paul Graham has just come out with another thought-provoking essay, this time on dealing with distraction and its ugly child, procrastination. I have had a lot of experience with those things over the years, especially as I moved from being an engineer to being a company founder and then a company runner.
Hands-on engineering used to be my daily work. And one of the fond memories I have of that is focus; the ability to concentrate on one specific problem for hours at a time, until it was solved. It was like having missile lock. In the best moments of flow, you could have hit me on the head with a brick, and the chances are I'd have thought it was a mere gnat and absent-mindedly (because my mind was on the problem) slapped it away.
But now I'm a CEO, and so as I mentioned recently in an interview my work is pretty much to make sure that everything that needs done, gets done. Of course I don't actually do it all myself, but my todo list has changed from that of my engineering days where it had a few large tasks, to having a large number of small ones.