Text messaging while driving is just one inadvisable form of multitasking.

We only have 10 fingers, two hands and one brain. But getting them to juggle as many tasks as possible has become a matter of survival in the digital age.
We e-mail while eating. We phone while driving. We text message while cooking, cleaning and keeping the kids in line. We use short sentences. Or no sentences at all.
And though Zen masters have long advised that while drinking tea, a person should only drink tea, today’s caffeine fix is often interrupted by devices that twitter, beep and keep a constant vigil on collapsing stock portfolios.
But if multitasking is no longer just the province of manic workaholics and harried moms, what effect is it having on social lives and professional performance- And just how much actual work is getting done as our minds dart among gadgets, deadlines and distractions?
“You have to keep in mind that you sacrifice focus when you do this,” said Edward M. Hallowell, a psychiatrist and author of “CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked and About to Snap!”
He told The Times’s Alina Tugend that multitasking is like “playing tennis with three balls.”
Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California at Irvine, told Ms. Tugend that “people actually worked faster in situations where they were interrupted, but they produced less.” Professor Mark, who has studied multitasking, calls it “bad for innovation.”
Perhaps the pace that multitasking engenders has become a bad habit as well. Matt Richtel and Ashlee Vance reported in The Times that the enforced idleness that computer users must endure while their machines start up has become such a source of frustration that manufacturers are responding.
Telling the reporters that “it’s ridiculous to ask people to wait a couple of minutes,” Sergei Krupenin, executive director of DeviceVM, is marketing quick-boot programs designed to calm impatient consumers who cannot stand such glacially slow start-ups as, say, longer than 30 seconds.
But just as technology helped create the attention deficit generation, technology is also providing ways of coping with fragmented lives.
Some students and professionals who want better focus are turning to drugs used for treating attention deficit disorder.
Benedict Carey, in a Times article, quoted an anonymous posting on the Chronicle of Higher Education Web site, extolling the advantages of the drug Adderall: “I’m talking about being able to take on twice the responsibility, work twice as fast, write more effectively, manage better, be more attentive, devise better and more creative strategies.”
And what about those people who are so used to flipping between windows, channels and gadgets that they are incapable of carrying on a normal conversation without interrupting or drifting off into other thoughts?
Alex Pentland of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has developed software and a cellphone-like device that monitors the nuances of conversations and over time teaches its users how to communicate more effectively and pay attention to others. As Anne Eisenberg wrote in The Times, “such tools could help users better handle the many subtleties of face-to-face and group interactions - or at least stop hogging the show at committee meetings.”
For those who do not have a digital device to warn them of boorish, rude or inattentive social behavior, however, there is always the dependable stand-by from the analog age: the brutally honest co-worker, friend or spouse.