You will not regret investing the time needed to read this article. Written in 2005, it provides a great overview of distraction in the modern workplace and some of the approaches people take to deal with it.

It provides relevant insights for knowledge workers in the 21st century:

• embracing and managing interruption as a necessary part of our jobs as opposed to a nuisance to be eliminated
• some caveats for distributed teams that need to be acknowledged and accommodated
• use of GTD as a technique for managing distraction / interruptions
• justification for larger/multiple computer monitors
• recognizing the reality of “continuous partial attention”