WARNING: This page will link you to good articles you will actually have to read, to get maximum benefit from them. Mostly they are articles not written for people with short attention spans. Reading takes time.
If you want absolute minimum distraction, the Google "classic" home page is pretty close to ideal: http://www.google.com, but if you create an account, and log in, it changes to iGoogle. Then you can start modifying your homepage, and then it can get quite complicated. But at least you have some control over what it shows.