YOU may think 24 hours are not enough in a day - and a new generation of multitaskers would agree with you.

Researchers have found that typical middle-class city dwellers now have so many timesaving gadgets that they can cram into 24 hours the same quantity of tasks that a decade ago would have taken 31 hours to complete.

For many, the frenzy starts over breakfast, reading e-mails on a hand-held BlackBerry while making toast. It carries on in the car where the driver with a Blue-tooth earpiece holds a conference call while keeping an ear on the radio and checking the sat nav.

Work is then a blizzard of e-mails, phone calls and meetings, often happening simultaneously. The most intense period of multitasking, however, is in the evening, according to OTX, an American think tank.

“People will be pushing the television remote control while surfing on a wireless laptop computer balanced on their knee, e-mailing and texting friends on a mobile phone and holding a conversation with friends or spouse,” said Patrick Moriarty, one of the authors of the report, which will be published this summer. “They may be far more mentally engaged than they are in the office.”

According to the study, which questioned 3,000 people, while television remains the main focus of attention in the evening, nearly half the respondents were also using computers and phones to catch up with friends, update their Facebook or MySpace social networks, or download and listen to music.

Even eating took second place to internet activities in half the households questioned.

“It makes you wonder what people were doing in the mid1990s, when all the devices were far rarer. It must have been a lot quieter,” said Moriarty. “Or maybe they talked to each other in the evenings.”

Moriarty’s team calculated that the tasks carried out in a typical day by participants in their study would have taken 31 hours using the primitive e-mail systems and mobile phones of 10 years ago.

The findings make predictions from 30 years ago seem absurd. Then, scientists who first borrowed the word multitasking from computing, warned of “brain overload” and that people would not be able to cope with more than three tasks at once.

Mark Vickery, 35, from Medway, Kent, agreed that for him and his wife Susan, an NHS doctor, the evening was the peak of multitasking in a day that could sometimes include as many as 18 hours in front of a screen.

“Both of us are out of the house during the day,” said Vickery, a marketing manager. “When we come back in the evening we tend to have a lot of technology on the go. We’ll be using online banking, Facebook and e-mail and using Sky + [a television recorder] to programme what shows we want to watch.

“On the one hand it’s good – you get more done. On the other hand, when I left university seven years ago, life was much simpler. There was more talking face-to-face and more time spent over dinner.”

Moriarty said limits to technology may mean multitasking is now peaking.

“I suspect smarter phones may add another couple of hours onto that, but we are probably at the limit of multitasking for this generation,” he said.

David Meyer, a psychology professor at Michigan University who advises the American government on the implications of multitasking, said the 31-hour day sounded both believable and depressing.

He said that observations of the brain made during multitasking showed that working out individual tasks took longer than if they were undertaken individually.

He also warned: “Forty per cent of the time people cannot remember the previous task they were doing, so they lose track. This can be fatal on the roads.”

Jonathan Taplin, media professor at the University of Southern California, said a backlash was starting to build against multitasking, with many workers declaring “e-mail bankruptcy” and wiping thousands of unread e-mails or resigning from internet social networks. Additional reporting: Chris Gourlay

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