Here is a brief excerpt from an article by Daniel Goleman for LinkedIn. To read the complete article and check out others, please click here.

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It happens to all of us: you’re working away on something you’ve got to get done, and suddenly you realize that for quite some time you’ve been lost in a reverie about something else entirely. You don’t know when your mind went off track, nor how long you’ve been meandering down this one.

Our minds wander, on average 50 percent of the time. The exact rate varies enormously. When Harvard researchers had 2,250 people report what they were doing and what they were thinking about at random points throughout their day, the doing-thinking gaps ranged widely.

But the biggest gap was during work: mind-wandering is epidemic on the job. But we can take steps that will help us stay on task more of the time when we need to.

[Here’s the first step.]

1. Manage your temptations. Many of the distractors that pull us away from what we’re working on are digital: tweets, emails, and the like. There are several apps that can wall off those temptations to wander off. Chrome has two free apps that do this: Nanny for Googleblocks off websites you might be tempted to visit, for whatever length of time you decide; StayFocusd

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Daniel Goleman’s latest works are FOCUS: The Hidden Driver of Excellence and a CD, Cultivating Focus: Techniques for Excellence. Other recent books are The Brain and Emotional Intelligence: New Insights and Leadership: The Power of Emotional Intelligence – Selected Writings (More Than Sound). Also, Leadership: A Master Class is Goleman’s first-ever comprehensive DVD series that examines the best practices of top-performing executives.