It don't matter what you do it's never going to be better then the part it's self. Yes you can make it read 3 meters but it's not going to give u good readings from say 1 meter to 3 meter
The part itself has quite an impressive bandwidth. With typical collector dark current of 10nA and collector current of 1mA with IF 10mA @ 12mm, that's 5 orders of magnitude for sensitivity to light. With IF = 50mA, could get 7mA collector current which is a light/dark ratio of 700,000.
Could use extra pins with series resistors to set range , i.e. 1MΩ, 510K, 240K, 220K, 110K, 56K for 64 ranges (6-bit) just by setting variations of output high or input.
Just some ideas ... all untested with this part. However, I have used the OP293A and OP805SL in a totally different application and achieved a range of 1 cm to 4 meters.