I REMEMBER with great fondness the chairman of a well-known company who once admitted to me that he preferred to race up ten flights of stairs to his office rather than start the day furiously jabbing the lift button. Since he couldn’t bear to slow down, he just went faster.

We are so in thrall to hyperactivity that Britain is littered with people who simply must send 500 e-mails a day from their electronic keyboard, whether they are flitting between world-changing meetings or the holiday villa and the pool. One friend has ordered her husband to bubble-wrap the hand-held interloper and mail it home from Tuscany. What he sees as a liberating gadget, she sees as tyranny.

“Blackberry thumb” is now the must-have medical ailment. One can only thank heavens for the Futuro Thumb Stabilizer, a flesh-coloured glove that is flooding in from America to support us through this difficult period. And not a minute too soon. Even two years ago The Priory, famous for treating drug and alcohol users, was reporting increased numbers of patients who could not stop sending text messages on their mobiles for up to seven hours a day.

We are being crippled — literally — by two related delusions. The first is the idea that there is enough time to do everything, if only we manage our time properly. The self-help industry has made a fortune out of this fallacy, but it is simply not possible to cram in everything the magazines tell you to do and still sleep at night. The second is the feeling that we must be in constant contact with the universe — that disaster will strike unless the client gets that Powerpoint presentation, the deal goes through, the call is made, this very minute. Perhaps we overstate our own importance in order to compensate for perpetually failing the time-management test.

In an article for Harvard Business Review, the psychiatrist Edward Hallowell has claimed that modern executives are suffering from a syndrome that he calls Attention Deficit Trait. This is not a neurological condition like Attention Deficit Disorder, but is created by the way we work. Its symptoms are “distractability, inner frenzy and impatience”. Uh-oh. “Modern culture all but requires many of us to develop ADT,” he says. “Never in history has the human brain been asked to track so many data points.” And never before, he might have added, has status been so invested in being constantly in demand.

The frontal lobes of the brain, Hallowell says, can get overloaded. When they are faced with making the sixth decision after the fifth interruption in the middle of a search for the ninth missing piece of information, they start to panic. The deeper, primitive parts of the brain then shift into survival mode, dimming intelligence and leading the manager either to make impulsive judgments to extinguish the danger, or sometimes to avoid taking any decision at all. The manager loses creativity, forgets the big picture, cannot control his irritability.

Sounds familiar? When Alastair Campbell got into trouble for e-mailing a screed of expletives to the BBC’s Newsnight programme in February, a former aide may have been more perceptive than he realised in commenting that it was time to “disengage the Blackberry and re-engage the brain”.

If ADT exists, it might explain why the nation’s productivity has barely improved despite technological progress and longer working hours. Since Gordon Moore stated 40 years ago that the number of transistors on a chip would double every 24 months, Moore’s Law has held remarkably true. Computer processing power has grown exponentially as we have increased transistor density. Yet maybe humans have just got more dense at the same time, because our processing power is finite. We can ’t just strap on another two megabytes of memory.

And we dissipate what we’ve got. I bet the clever people who invented those chips didn’t sit in open-plan offices with colleagues handing round baby photos and gossiping about last night’s soap opera. I bet they didn’t do their own typing because it was too difficult to find a secretary, let alone pluck up the courage to ask her to get off the phone. I bet they didn’t tune in to the news every two minutes: they were, after all, where it was at.

The rest of us have subscribed to a gospel of connectedness that has kept us team-building, communicating, keeping on top of every spurious event in the global village, until we can barely concentrate long enough to enter our credit card details. We don’t even question the open-plan office. It has been around so long that we have got used to arriving earlier and earlier to get some real work done before the noise begins and drowns out all creative endeavour. But that is absurd. When I came to The Times three years ago I regularly sought the solitude of the fire escape to check whether my argument was coherent. (I soon got over that, as you can see.) I felt pretty silly, but then I went down to the City and found bankers sitting side by side wearing ear defenders — more commonly seen at clay pigeon shoots — to focus on their mind-boggling calculations.

We are fatally attracted to distraction. The MindGym, a company that coaches executives, has found that people consistently encourage interruptions in their working day, even when they think they are doing the opposite. They are flattered to be asked for advice or information, so interruptions reinforce the sense of their own importance. And that self-importance in turn makes them demand to know everything that is going on.

What is to be done? Should we check ourselves in to a caring institution? Junk the gadgets? Don’t be hasty. The ADT thesis in itself should help us to recognise that much of our frustration is of our own making. Campaign for an office with a door. Get some perspective on your minor role in the universe. Many problems solve themselves if you leave them a while. Oh, and don’t take the “crackberry” on holiday.

camilla.cavendish@thetimes.co.uk

Join the Debate
Send your e-mails via
www.timesonline.co.uk/debate

Times Recommends

• In the real world, the public sector must pay
• Playing politics in a land of double Dutch
• Be like the plinth people: not set in stone