When you employ yourself in writing, there are three cardinal sins you can commit. None of them gets you admitted to hell, but they make hell out of writing. Avoiding them should be your priority. If it helps you, put the writing on the wall. It helped Nebuchadnezzar, sort of. Keep your head on one thing your doing at a time and jot everything else down to chase up later.
In an ideal working world, you have completed all pertinent research before starting to write the article. The writing process becomes thus a simple distillation procedure relying on your perfectly organized notes. If you didn't recognize yourself in this last sentence, don't worry, we don't live in an ideal world. In this real world, no matter how meticulously you do your research, there will always be a funny anecdote, a relevant quote, crucial statistical data, or an elucidating weird fact that you imagine having missed.
It might be natural to grab the phone and call your source of information for the correct quote; or pommel the computer to chase down that proverb you remember your grandmother used so many times. Don't do it. Your source probably went to the Himalayas for a three months holiday, and your grandmother said something completely different anyway and in Pashtun or Latvian which won't translate. Instead of writing, you are getting bogged down by a wild goose chase.
Even if you managed to get hold of whatever you wanted, you are mixing writing and research processes you should keep separate at all times. Research is collecting data and ideas, writing is about getting all this into an organized and coherent whole. Your article will show the rifts and breaks if you keep on interrupting yourself.
If you really need to chase something down, do it later. Insert a place holder where you need to insert more data or a quote and make it stand out. Then continue with writing your article to its end keeping to the thread you set out in your head. This allows you to write quickly and save you time in editing when going over it.
Having got rid of the need to do instant research, there is a worse sin to commit than to mix writing with chasing information: Mixing writing with other things outside of the writing world. The distractions around you are manifold. There are enough in your natural world without you adding your own on top. You don't need to know what is going on on Facebook or Twitter while you write, and the music videos can wait until after you have finished. Make your life easy by keeping the outside world away from your head as best you can. You’ll cut your writing time in half when you devote yourself to it fully.
With the distractions of impromptu research and videos out of the way, you just have to write and avoid at all costs to get stuck. There are parts in articles that come easily, and there are others that make you sweat. Don't try to make the difficult part perfect from the word go. If you struggle, just get it done the best way you can at this point, and then leave it for later. Mark it and get on. Usually, when you start reading the finished article from start, fixing the difficult part becomes easy.
Leaving the filling in of all your markers to the very end is a major time saver. Once you circle back to fill in that eluding quote or obstreperous fact, you will find it to be unnecessary after all. A statistic on which you could have spent an hour or more to chase it down would refer to a section of the article you're cutting down anyhow. The quote or anecdote became redundant, because you used others later that do the job. You’re already over your word count anyway and can't fit in more. And the paragraph you struggled with becomes easy to fix because you now know not only the beginning but also the end of your article. With all this, you've saved loads of time and hours of unnecessary work. Delete the markers and the thing is done.
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