Do you find yourself constantly interrupted during the workday? Interrupted by bosses, email, pages, cellphone calls, office calls, co-workers, family, subordinates....and on and on? If so, you're not alone. You belong to the group that -- due to an incredible amount of interruptions every single day -- causes many companies lose hundreds of billions of dollars in productivity costs.

You may think that instant messaging and email have made you more productive -- and by many counts both have -- but they also take time away from real work, according to estimates. To a point, I would argue that both enhance work and allow collaboration in a more efficient way. That is, until workers start hanging on every communications as if they are missing something important. Based on habits, many of us do this. Result? Lost productivity at the workplace.

According to Linda Stone, a writer and lecturer on attention and trends, workers live in a state of "continuous partial attention. [...] The motivation is 'I don't want to miss anything' because being connected makes me feel important. It's 'There's my BlackBerry. There's my cell phone. What time is it in Europe right now? How many phone calls did I get?'"

Those attitudes and state of "partial attention" prevent workers from focusing and concentrating on their jobs, which in turn costs U.S. business $588 billion each year. Can change occur? That's up to all the tools and our propensity to use them -- possibly all at the same time. Sorry, I have to go now, my boss is paging me...