Hit me very close to home, except for the organization part. I have a box for every last pin that I own. And this is how I cope with it.

1.

Organize stuff around you. Make a hobby out of it, see beauty in organization. The things that are lying around you, and they way they lie around represent you. Any thing you do carries a bit of your personality and nothing does more easily so than clutter ( or the lack of it ). Think of the space around you as a painting - how would you want it to be? What this brings is clarity, clarity is a prerequsite for focus. Good cooks have clean kitchens, great programmers indent/refactor.

2.

I am unaware of the passage of time mostly. You wake me, hand me a book and ask me after 10 hours how long it has been, I would say something like 2 hours. This is not good when you are working on a programming problem which has a deadline which doesnot permit degression. You have to do it now. To remind myself of the passage of time, I run a watch command on my linux terminal and make it play a sound every 5 minutes. At the end of every 5 minutes I mark a point in a paper. If I was working on the problem or was working on some GREATER cause. If I catch myself working for the greater good, I give myself a 0 for those 5 minutes, else a 1. When you monitor yourself like this, the mear act of monitoring and putting your awareness on how you deal with your time at a minute level makes you focus.

( This is like rescuetime, but I want the conscious act of marking on a paper, I think this is what helps me on a real time basis than the rescuetime report. Besides, even when I have my editor open, I might wander into thinking about the greater good. Only I can hold myself accountable in the end! )

3.

When I want to not focus but be creative ( yes, they seem to be opposite states of mind, I know this from my own experience ): Say I am desiging a large project or want inspiration I go for a long walk into the evening sun( Leave your cell at home dammit ). The walking motion has something which someone will probably explain using neurology in 20 years, but for now, take it from me: for Creativity/Design walk. If I have a small scale design problem like how to frame this function I walk inside my room, in the form of 8 ( or infinity which ever catches your fancy ).

4.

Caffine helps a lot, after a while the act of holding and sipping hot liquid takes over as a placebo, so you can experiment with various other less harmful stuff. ( yes, I can fool myself: its my gift and my curse ). Trance music helps too, The flow of most transmusic has a sense of urgency and it helps to absorb that into your psyche and show it in your action. I am currently using pandora for transmusic.

But the observation that the good will go with the bad is very true. I believe that this is an engineering trade off that has been built into some of our minds. Very much like risc vs cisc. We just need to learn how to consciously switch to the other mode. Because afterall the real strength lies in the "visionary streak".

I am still learning all these stuff myself, but someone said that if we had a word for teaching while learning and learning while teaching, the world would be a better place.