Do this 30-minute application to sharpen your attention, focus

Set a timer to go off every five minutes while you perform a task
Build your brain's monitoring powers instead

Mindfulness, cognitive training, a healthy lifestyle may help sharpen your focus, these are some of the almost impossible ways to regain the once prized focus and attention. They are the bread and butter of a healthy brain, but we cannot start with them. Rather, there is a small exercise that can build up to the giant brain boosters.

However, let's not forget that when it matters, like a deadline, a client's work, honing a craft, an interest, that focus and attention show up to get the job done. So it is often when we are simply getting easily distracted in the absence of a serious issue at hand, or even despite the serious issue, that we start to worry about having attention deficit problems.

You might be happy to hear that it is not all your fault or the information and entertainment noise around you.

Deep inside your brain where you can't access, wear and tear happens that affects processing. The brain accumulates damage from inflammation, injury to blood vessels especially from certain diseases or conditions, build up of abnormal proteins and the gradual shrinking of the brain, according to Dr. Kirk Daffner, a neurologist and director of the Center for Brain/Mind Medicine at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital.

These make it harder to filter out stimuli to stay focused. Which is why it is important to have brain exercise to keep it in shape.

Other conditions also affect your focus including mental and sleep and sensory disorders. You spend too much time trying to remain alert and figure out basic things that you waste cognitive resources. Medication side effects especially drugs for disorders and allergies.

Alcoholism and drug abuse and information overload. Like a computer that slows when it is overloaded, the brain starts to under perform. "When there's too much material, it burdens our filtering system and it's easy to get distracted," Dr. Daffner says.

Try this 30-minute focus exercise

Pick a task of your choice, for example reading.
Read any material of your choice for 30 minutes.
Set a timer to go off every five minutes.
Every time it goes off, check in with yourself and ask if your mind or thoughts have wandered while you were reading.
If they wandered, refocus on what you are reading until the 30 minutes elapse.

The exercise was developed by Kim Willment, a neuropsychologist of Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital. It trains your brain to monitor your mind if it wanders. By applying the exercise, the brain's monitoring process and ability to sustain focus on a task will greatly improve.