(Forbes)(Forbes)

We've all had days — perhaps weeks and even months — when we can't seem to focus on anything. One minute you're reading an article online, the next you're typing e-mails — and before you can send them you're instant messaging a co-worker, checking on the stock market or jotting down notes for an upcoming meeting. The end result: It feels like nothing's getting done.

But it may not be entirely your fault. Research is showing that there's actually a range of causes for your frustration, from the medical to the instinctual. The good news is there are ways to improve one's ability to pay attention.

Improving the ability to focus, in fact, can have serious financial benefits. At one end of the spectrum, researchers have estimated that people who have attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) do one month's less work per year than those without the disorder and that, as of 2005, household income losses due to the condition totaled about $77 billion US annually.

The average person who doesn't struggle with ADHD, however, doesn't fare much better. Figures from the New York-based consulting firm Basex show that unnecessary workplace interruptions, such as cellphone calls or redundant e-mails, wreak havoc on our attention spans, taking 28 per cent of U.S. workers' days and an economic toll of $650 billion a year in productivity.

"If your attention is being broken constantly, you actually have to mentally reconstruct what you've been thinking," says Daniel Anderson, a professor in the department of psychology at the University of Massachusetts. "You've lost precious seconds and you may have also lost fundamental insights."

It's Human Nature

One of the reasons it's so difficult to stay focused is that humans are naturally prone to interruption, says Maggie Jackson, author of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. We jump to react to new information as a built-in survival instinct, e.g., stop what you're doing since there's a hungry saber-toothed tiger 20 feet away. The problem is that, in today's world, this same preprogrammed reaction kicks in and takes us away from our work to tune in to breaking news about O.J. Simpson or Paris Hilton — not exactly the sort of thing our survival depends on.

While there aren't a lot of studies showing exactly what shapes a person's attention span, Anderson says early child rearing appears to play a role. In other words, it's within our power, to some degree, to keep ourselves focused if we learn how at an early age. Research has suggested that the amount of chaos in a home and a tendency by parents to interrupt their children during play — rather than allowing them to engage deeply — can harm the development of a child's attention span or performance on cognitive tests, which require sustained attention.

Anderson's own work, published this year in the journal Child Development, shows that kids three and under who played while an episode of the game show Jeopardy! aired in the background spent half as long with a toy before abandoning it, compared with those playing in the absence of the program. Focused attention, when a child is seriously interested in a toy, fell by 25 per cent with the television on.

How To Stay Focused

While it's impossible to turn back the clock to our childhoods, there are ways we can improve our ability to pay attention in the here and now.

A new study out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, published earlier this year in the journal PLoS Biology, shows that meditation can help. Volunteers went through three months of intensive training in Vipassana meditation, an ancient Indian technique that embraces self observation. Afterward, when faced with distraction, the volunteers proved better at completing tasks involving looking for target numbers mixed into a series of distracting letters that quickly flashed on a screen.

'If you need to concentrate, don't leave it to chance.'—Maggie Jackson, author

Similarly, the University of California and the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies are soon expecting to show the benefits that shamatha meditation, a Buddhist practice, might have on people who are participating in three-month long meditation retreats at the Shambhala Mountain Center in Colorado.

Other work suggests a relationship between exercise and attention, too. Research by Arthur Kramer, a professor in the department of psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has shown that when sedentary aging adults, ages 58 to 78, take up a regimen of brisk walking they can improve their ability to ignore distractions. And the same may be true of mental exercise. Early findings from a 2007 Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center study indicate that regularly practicing tasks that necessitate shutting out distractions can help healthy older adults improve their concentration. In other words, a crossword puzzle may be a good remedy for an ailing attention span.

Another step that might help you improve your attention span is simply to get rid of the clutter. At Blanchard Schaefer, a Texas-based ad and public relations agency, employees can retreat to a "womb room," a plain, unwired space, to think without interruption, Jackson says.

But you can just as easily turn away from your computer screen so you won't be tempted to read e-mails while talking to coworkers in your office or realize that a noisy, crowded Starbucks may not be the best place to have a serious conversation.

"It sounds like common sense," Jackson says, "but you actually have to be ruthless in creating the environment for attention you need. If you need to concentrate, don't leave it to chance."