Let me tell you an anecdote about my personal experience. Let me know if any of this sounds familiar. As the years went by, I began to realize that a lot of the managers/mentors I had worked for and looked up to when I was younger simply did not know what they were talking about. You're too easily distracted -- focus, pick yourself up by your bootstraps, they would say! But they would never talk about how the left hand of the organization and the right hand of the organization didn't agree. And I began to wonder if they were making things up in order to deflect blame away from the leadership structure which included themselves.

Of course, that sinking suspicion turned out to be generally true. When I worked at hypergrowth companies with great leaders (rare to find and whom I must say I somewhat took for granted), guess how often I found it hard to focus? Very rarely. Now, what about all the other places with organizational dysfunction? Oh, it was VERY hard for me to focus. Borderline impossible, really.

It turns out that my to-do lists, my "productivity hacks" my treasured knowledge bases -- all of them were a very specific kind of procrastination I was doing to maintain some semblance of control trying to get work done in an organization that made questionable decisions over my head. I was trying to avoid having the hard conversations with the people who made those decisions because they were stressful and risky and if they went the wrong way I would have to leave. Which I did on more than one occasion.

But since that point, my brain went from being "a weird place" as you phrase it, to being a place that works on my behalf. Let me tell you, it took a lot more work, but it's a lot more convenient this way. You spend a lot of time with your brain -- 8-16 hours of conscious time every day of every year. If it's not playing nicely with you, it might be worth investing in turning it around to work on your behalf. It can take a while (probably 6 years on my part), but I assure you that it's worth the effort. Some of that will pertain just to you in particular -- exercise, seeing a therapist, yoga, mindfulness training, what have you. But some of that will be directly changing your environment.

Changing your environment means working in an environment where you aren't forced to be distracted. Many jobs page you with BS at odd intervals and make it hard to engage in deep focus -- that, or you're turned into a ticket jockey with very little time or agency to think deeply about how to solve problems. Alternatively, your living environment can contribute to this -- are you stuck with housemates or a family which is constantly making it impossible for you to focus? If so, it will be hard to focus no matter what /you/ do until you take out the environmental aggressor.

And beyond that, if you're going to use a tool to help you focus, I'd recommend a schedule builder [1] rather than a to-do list. To-do lists often feel a lot more helpful than they actually are -- it's not a good thing that it feels so "fun" to check off an item. Compartmentalizing your day into intervals which you use to focus on various kinds of work is the ideal because it makes it easier to build the habits you want to build. Habit formation is the key to long term success at just about any pursuit in life.

https://www.nirandfar.com/todo-vs-schedule-builder/