I had the idea yesterday of helping myself to focus by writing down exactly what I’m going to do next on a post-it note and put it on the bottom of my monitor. When I’m done with it, I throw it away and put up another one. If I cannot avoid switching tasks before it’s done, I’ll stick it to my desk and put another in its place until I finish that one. When that’s finished, I put the other post-it back up.

If my mind starts wandering or I ever wonder what to do, I just look at the post-it on the bottom of my monitor, go “Oh yeah!” and get back to it.

I definitely use a To-Do list, but the bigger it gets, the harder it is to focus on just one thing at a time with all the noise around it. Having a single post-it note with a single to-do on it has been helping tremendously.
It’s been working really well so far for me. If you have a huge, varied workload and have problems focusing on one thing at a time, try this. 🙂