You nailed it. Lately I've been bored by my work. When I'm excited about what I'm working on, the problem is much less serious.

Try to avoid extraneous sites (and email and IM, if possible) until you've gotten something done. I.e. don't start your day off with surfing and email. If you are bored by your work it is too easy to not get started and just continue reading stuff online. The effect of this is that by the time you get around to doing work, your brain is totally scrambled by all the stuff you just piped into it - making it even harder to finish the boring stuff you need to do, and more tempting to just return to the distractions.

At least that is how it is for me. I've found that if I have boring work stuff to do, the ONLY way I can get it done in any sort of reasonable time frame is to just immediately dive into it and barrel through it as soon as I wake up. (actually after I wake up and do a bit of exercise)

Of course any super rich and successful person will tell you the real way to solve the boring work problem is to convince someone else to do it for you, so you can spend more time keeping up on things. :)

Thanks for the tip. I'll definitely try it.