An abstract, all for me?
In my experience, finding and understanding the different "summaries" in a text, from abstracts to conclusions, can be more time wasting than the article itself. Patience is inevitable with some of these articles, and it might be best to find another if time is a constraint.
if I didn't understand a word in a sentence, I forbade myself from proceeding to the next sentence until I looked it up in a textbook
It's so easy to just skip a single word. Because most of the time, it won't even matter for that sentence or paragraph. However, we should be careful not to adopt that mentality of tolerance. If we don't understand a minimum of what a sentence/paragraph means, we'll quickly find we have no idea what's going on.
I eliminated all other distractions
For me, reading scientific papers requires an enormous amount of concentration and time. This is essential.