I spend a lot of time trying to stay focused on the task at hand. But with the joys of multitasking I generally have a lot of crap going on the desktop. Several documents open in text mate, an IM conversation and multiple tabs in the terminal:
So I am always looking for ways to improve this situation. Lately two (or rather three) great tools have changed things quite a bit. First is Isolator, an incredibly useful little app that hides everything but the app you are using behind a little screen, which can be activated with a keyboard shortcut.
I have also been converted to the joys of a tiling window manager by a coworker. I installed awesomewm on my mac via macports, and Ratpoison on my RHEL 5 box (awesome is not available from yum for rhel 5). That way I can do all my terminal stuff with no distraction, and its great to have multiple terminals running together. Here is my workspace at work now:
