How do you get in your "productive" mode?
access_denied: I am doing Getting Things Done (GTD).  One part of it is the so-called "Processing" step.  That means you gather all your notes, scraps of paper and so on and work it into your GTD-system. I do this at the beginning of the workday and it helps to focus my mind on what is going on in my world.  Because I have to think about my notes (What does that mean? Is it actionable?) I have to load the current "frontier" of problems into RAM.  On most days this leads to automatically starting to work directly on the problem at hand and getting into the zone.