Staying focused is something that's harder and harder in this age of information. Did you know that 90% of all the data in the world has been created over the last two years?

The lure of social media is constantly dragging us away from important tasks. You think you'll just have a quick look and before you know it, half an hour has passed. The distraction of email is just as bad, but we console ourselves that “it's work”.

While there's more and more information vying for our attention, our ability to focus is, if anything, getting worse.

It's not helped by information being fed to us in smaller and smaller chunks. Look at movie trailers for example. In the 1950s, the average amount of cuts per minute was twelve – now the average is thirty-eight; over three times as much.

But the trouble isn't just the speed and the amount of information that's thrown at us, it's that our brains can't multi-task.

David Meyer, director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at Michigan University and one of the country's leading experts on multi-tasking, says “You can't do two cognitively complicated tasks at once. When you're on the phone and writing an email at the same time, you're actually switching back and forth between them, since there's only one mental and neural channel through which language flows.”

It's been known for some time that when our brains are focused on a task, we can fail to see other things that are in plain sight. This phenomenon is known as “inattentional blindness”. One of the famous examples of this is the “invisible gorilla” experiment (www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/videos.html). Viewers are asked to watch a video of players passing around a basketball and count the number of passes. Whilst focused on counting, they end up failing to observe a man in a gorilla suit walking across the centre of the screen.

But more worrying, new results show that our visual field does not need to be cluttered with other objects to cause this “blindness”. Focusing on remembering something we have only just seen is enough to make us unaware of things that happen around us.

Professor Nilli Lavie from UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, said:

“An example of where this is relevant in the real world is when people are following directions on a sat nav while driving. Our research would suggest that focusing on remembering the directions we've just seen on the screen means that we're more likely to fail to observe other hazards around us on the road, for example an approaching motorbike or a pedestrian on a crossing, even though we may be ‘looking' at where we're going.”

It's as if the visual pathway to the brain is a single-track path with information having to take turns to travel along it. Basically it means that even though the eyes “see” the object, the brain may not.

Unfortunately, the only way to solve the sat nav problem is not to use one; but there are other ways to improve our focus.

Single-Tasking

Firstly, rather than spending an hour “multi-tasking”, split your time up. So instead of writing a document, making phone calls and checking emails all at the same time, spent twenty minutes on each. Twenty minutes on the document, twenty minutes on phone calls and twenty minutes on emails. If you can manage it, you'll find you write better and have more insightful conversations and just as importantly, your mind will stay fresher.

Focus Training

Having a lack of focus is very much like having a lack of fitness. As with physical exercise, you build up your stamina over time. The same can be done with your focus.

Try performing a task, without letting yourself get distracted for thirty minutes. It can be any task but it's important that it's not an activity you love, so you have to make some effort to stay focused. Then for three or four days, increase the period by five or ten minutes each day.

You don't need to push beyond an hour. But just by spending three or four days building up your concentration, you'll really notice the difference.

The important thing is not to take a break in that time, not even for a minute.

A Busy Mind Is a Focused Mind

What Nilli Lavie found helped keep people focused, was making the task more visually demanding. That meant adding more colours and shapes. So if you are focusing on learning something, use different coloured pens and different symbols for indexing the information. This takes up more of your brain's processing power and doesn't leave it with any inclination or energy to wander.

Don't Waste the Power Hour

Of course there's no point in trying to be really focused at the end of a long day, it's just not going to happen. We are at our most alert first thing in the morning, so don't waste that first hour looking through emails. Give yourself one hour focused thinking on your current task and after that look at emails/check social media.

But make sure you stick to one hour. Your brain will find it a lot easier to stay focused when it knows it can bunk off after exactly an hour and look through emails and social media updates.

The trouble is, distraction feels good. Your brain's reward circuit lights up when you multi-task (even though you're not actually multi-tasking, just getting distracted a lot) which means that you get an emotional high when you're doing a lot at once. So as long as it knows it's going to get its reward after an hour, it will be happy.

David Rock, co-founder of the NeuroLeadership Institute says: “A distraction is an alert; it says to your brain, ‘Orient your attention here now; this could be dangerous.' Your brain's reaction is automatic and virtually unstoppable.”

The secret is not to get distracted. So for that one hour, make sure the only connection is between you and your project; switch everything else off.

Rock studied thousands of people and found that we are only truly focused for an average of only six hours per week.

So try to give yourself one fully focused hour every weekday morning. Use it to work on an important project without any distraction.

It's not the best way to focus; it's the only way to focus.