Eating on the run. Cellphoning while driving. Email avalanches. Distracted living. We prize knowledge work, yet have little time to think. We can contact millions of people worldwide, but have trouble sitting down to chat or eat with those we love. In this wondrous, high-tech, hyper-mobile age, something crucial is missing: attention -- the key to recapturing our ability to connect, reflect, and relax; the secret to coping with an overloaded, boundary-less world. What's needed now is a renaissance of attention. By quelling distraction and strengthening our powers of attention, we can thrive -- not just survive -- in a complex, mutable new age. Think "Planet Focus." Here’s how to get started:

Speak a Language of Attention -- Attention isn't just one thing. It's now considered by most neuroscientists to be a tripartite set of skills made up of focus, awareness, and executive attention, i.e. planning and decision-making. Perhaps most importantly, scientists are beginning to discover that attention can be bolstered through practice and training. There's more research yet to be done on this score, but these initial discoveries can help us thrive in a world of overload. Try deliberately using all your senses to expand your awareness fully when you’re in a new situation, such as a job interview. Or when you are struggling with a tough task, try keeping the "spotlight" of your focus on that challenge, pulling it back if your mind drifts. Think of these attentional skills as different arrows in your cognitive quiver.

Be Wary of Interruptions -- An interruption is much more than a delay in your to-do list. Researchers from the new field of "interruption science" have discovered that knowledge workers switch tasks every three minutes. And once interrupted, a worker takes an average 25 minutes to return to their original task, according to informatics scientist Gloria Mark. Humans are built to be interrupted, since that’s how we stay tuned to changes in our environment. But that means we have trouble pursuing our goals, and even remembering our goals, since our short-term memory is quite limited. Try to turn off the ringers and control the urge to check email constantly if you want to get focused work done.

Practice Message Restraint -- All too often, we are each other’s distractions -- especially when it comes to the floods of messages washing over us daily. The average worker gets 156 emails a day, according to the Radicati research group. And that’s just the beginning; instant-messages, phone calls, faxes and snail mail add to the influx. Jonathan Spira, chief executive officer of the business research firm Basex, cautions people to send only clear, brief, necessary messages, avoid one-word replies such as "Great!", and refrain from duplicating messages in multiple media. "We still have a lot of work to do in managing the knowledge worker’s attention," observes Spira.

Focus on One Another -- We’re so used to splitting our focus between pdas and tvs, and people and tasks that it’s hard to truly attend to any one thing. But continuous partial attention undermines the depth and quality of our relationships and our interactions. When we give each other half-focus in conversations, on conference calls, or at meals, we are effectively saying, "you aren’t worth my time." As well, the "creative energy and critical thinking" that occurs in a good work meeting is lost when everyone's madly checking email, writes Intel principal engineer Nathan Zeldes in an article on the costs of "infomania" in the e-journal First Monday. Focusing in full on one another can help people better connect in a fast-paced, overloaded world.

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