Phone rings. Status updates check. IM chat messages beep. And a thousand other distractions get at us daily. Before you know it, you’ve spent two hours on Facebook, an hour responding to chat messages, and a couple of minutes typing an SMS or answering a phone call.

Welcome to the age of distraction. Thanks so much World Wide Web!

If you think about it, it boils down to the issue of control. Are you in control of your tools or are you controlled by them?

To achieve anything, athletes, organizations and even artists set goals. It’s easier to follow some kinds of goals than just linger around appearing to do something but in fact, nothing is being accomplished.

What are your top distractions?

I can list quite a few.

Facebook
Plurk
Twitter
My Google reader
Yahoo Messenger IM’s
Blog-hopping without purpose
Watching youtube videos
Fidgeting around trying to look for books to arrange or dirt to clean up
Tinkering with too many blogs
Too much reading
Chatter with the officemates during work hours
Playing online games
Checking Google Adsense for the twenty-fifth time in a day
Checking web analytics for the nth time in a day

What are yours? Feel free to add yours in the comments section.

To combat distractions, you should set goals. Here are four reasons why you need goals.

1. Goals help keep you on the right road.

Without a GPS device, you might get lost in a city you’re not familiar with. If you’re trying to achieve something you’ve not done before, then goals can serve as your GPS in an uncertain terrain. No GPS available? Fine. Go get yourself a good old fashioned map. Your grandfather probably survived with that. You can, too.

2. Goals eliminate distractions.

If you know what you want, and you want them badly, you can say goodbye to lots of useless distraction. Your novel is waiting to be written. Your first million is waiting to be won. The girl of your dreams is waiting to be wooed.

Whatever it is that you want, goals can help you say goodbye to Farmville or any other distracting online game so you can get what you want.

3. Goals achieved can give you a high.

It’s addicting, really. One goal leads to another and you can get caught up in completing them all. Although they say that they journey is its own reward, it doesn’t hurt to arrive at your destination a little richer or a little better.

4. The pursuit of your goals keep you occupied.

When you are pursuing your goals, you really don’t have much time to waste for trivial stuff. I’m not saying you shouldn’t spend time with your family or that all you should ever do is work. You should also set aside time for those. But with goals in your head and in your mind, you will have less time spent on things that do not really matter for you.

Why don’t you spend a week of your life thinking about what you want in life and how you could transform this into goals?

Go on, take a break and think about your future. How can you live a meaningful life? How can you achieve more in less time?

Giving in to distractions means that you are not really set with your vision and your goals. Reviewing them might just give you added momentum to get working.

These blogs offer a number of tips on how you can further eliminate distractions:

Tips on Multitasking by OneMint.
Ten Practical Tips to Save time
Top Five Ways to Improve Productivity from eduBook
Momentum by Redroom blog
Silencing and Eliminating Distractions by Stevenhorner

Check out these books on Goal-setting: