In order to limit your distractibility, you should try to minimize context switches. Some interrupts are inevitable. However, viewing an engineer as an interruptible unit of work, whose context switches are free, is suboptimal if you want people to be happy and productive. Assign a cost to context switches. A 20-minute interruption while working on a project entails two context switches; realistically, this interruption results in a loss of a couple hours of truly productive work.
