[gaius]

I am wondering if completing tasks was easier in the past than it is today

Yes definitely. Here's how I used to work back in the day: I would sit down at my desk on which there would be one monitor, probably a 17" or if I was lucky a gorgeous 19" Trinitron with the blackest blacks. I would have my main tool maximised to full screen - Metrowerks CodeWarrior (Mac), Visual C++ (Windows) or SPARCworks (Sun). On my desk there would be a paper copy of the spec I was working on and a couple of reference books, all annotated by hand. I would code in two solid blocks interrupted only by lunch, and often times I would lose track of time and know it was lunchtime or hometime only when someone said.

Nowadays I work in little nibbles of 15-30 minutes at a time, and it's not just me either - everyone used to work like that and now works like this. Everyone seems busier because they are juggling more things at once, but studies have shown that multitasking is a myth, we get much less done than we used to. Modern tooling without modern distractions and interruptions would be the dream.