Comment by triggercut

I've often thought the same thing and have heard it from others too.

Body doubling seems to be a common technique. I've often considered if some form of self surveillance (webcam, heart rate, computer usage metrics) combined with ML could observe and "nudge" you along.

For (intrusive) thoughts sometimes I'd rather not fight it because I'll randomly suddenly remember something that I couldn't recall over an hour ago, or be reminded, or see a vague connection to another topic that could be useful to investigate later.

Maybe it's not so much being reminded to stay on task but make it as frictionless as possible to capture something and put it away safely so before you get completely derailed...

As for attention "drift" when you're forcing yourself to work on something that really saps your energy so your subconscious is trying to protect you by pulling you away? The only thing I've found to help is to organise my life so that the conditions that cause that to occur have less of a chance of happening (getting enough sleep, eating protein, taking medication at consistent time with food, meditating, listening to my body and taking regular breaks to prevent crossing the overwhelm threshold, do enough housework on routine so there's no reasonable excuse to do a load of laundry) which I guess is what a lot of coaching will try and help you do, setting up practical systems to remove triggers and optimise the ideal conditions (my speculation).

I can't remember why I started writing this reply or if I'm even anywhere close to it being on topic now, but rather than delete it, I'm just going to leave it here.