LAST SUMMER Edward Hallowell and his family were on holiday at a cottage at Lake Dolittle in Norfolk, Connecticut. There was no mobile-phone signal in the region and the cottage’s phone was an old-fashioned model with a dial.

Hallowell called a friend who was in the area to see if he wanted to meet up. He had just been for a swim, was relaxed and in no hurry. And yet the old phone nearly sent him round the bend. With each digit Hallowell became angrier as he watched the dial spin slowly back to the starting position and thought how much quicker this would be on his mobile.

The phone from hell was about to ring some changes in the busy doctor’s life.

“How could anyone still own such a slow phone? I fumed. What a stupid phone. How backward. But then I caught myself. This was absurd,” he writes in his new book.

After talking to his friend Hallowell called the number again to see how long the frustrating dialling had really taken. The answer was 11 seconds.

Hallowell, a former instructor at Harvard Medical School, has done a lot of work on attention-deficit disorder (ADD), working with people who feel chronically inattentive and disorganised. He also advises big companies and charities on workplace stress and other mental-health matters.

Somehow his reaction to the old dial phone reminded him of both his work with people suffering from ADD and with problems he was increasingly hearing from business people.

Was technology driving us mad, he wondered.

In the modern world we are all so frantically busy trying to operate at high speed that we risk being driven to distraction by something as innocuous as a slow phone. Instead of smashing the phone, Hallowell hit his computer to write his latest book: Crazybusy — Overstretched, Overbooked and about to Snap. Strategies for coping in a world gone ADD.

“In some ways we have never had it so good,” said Hallowell. Thanks to the internet and mobile communications, people can now do in a few minutes what once would have taken hours or even days, he said.

“But people are also taking on more than they can handle and losing the ability to think in depth,” he warned.

Relentless demand for our attention from e-mail, mobile calls, Blackberries and so on means that we are constantly distracted. Multitasking has become the norm. But while eating a sandwich and reading e-mail may be a cinch, people are not really good at multitasking sophisticated jobs.

“If you are driving and you are lost, the first thing you do is turn down the radio because you need to concentrate. Why do we think it’s any different at work?” said Hallowell. “These days people expect to be able to drive, read their e-mail, talk on the phone and eat — all at the same time.”

Instead of concentrating on one task and doing it well, people end up doing two or more tasks below their true ability.

The problem of multitasking and information overload has become so bad that it is prompting people to report what they fear is early Alzheimer’s disease. “It’s not that people’s memories are deteriorating, it’s just that they cannot absorb all the information that is being thrown at them,” he said.

Just as the rise of the car gave us terms such as traffic jam, gridlock and road rage, this modern dilemma needs its own new phrases. In Crazybusy, Hallowell offers up an array of new buzz words, including screensucking, frazzing and gemmelsmerch.

Unfortunately for companies and individuals, many businesses actively encourage this information overloading in their staff, said Hallowell.

“I gave a talk at IBM and suggested that people gave themselves a break from all this information and one guy told me it wasn’t possible because his superior demanded he was available all the time. But I would say that if our brains are on call 24/7, that creates a constant distraction that is not good for us or for the company in the long term.

“Business people are suckers for this idea that you have to work harder all the time. But to manage in this environment you have to exercise restraint. The harder work is thinking, not the collecting of information.”

Another woman Hallowell recently talked to had given up her Blackberry when she took up a new job at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the charity funded by the Microsoft founder and his wife.

“She said she had withdrawal symptoms for the first month. But now she feels she is concentrating much better on the jobs she is doing,” he said.

He said the solution to information overload was not to try and absorb more of it, but less.

One investment bank recently called Hallowell in because it wanted its brokers to spend less time on their screens. He said: “The chief executive was worried that they were stuck to their screens and not thinking enough. Corporate culture has to adapt to what is going on here.”

Hallowell is trying to start what sounds like the business equivalent of the slow-food movement, a culinary trend that fought to escape the instant fix of microwaved meals.

“There is a real dilemma here, but the solution is simple. Take back control. Switch off your Blackberry. Don’t answer every call. Delegate, ignore, cancel. These are wonderful words,” he said.

Vocabulary for a crazy world

Screensucking: wasting time stuck on the internet or Blackberry when you could be doing some work

EMV or e-mail voice: the ghostly tone of voice people assume on the phone when they are talking to you and reading their e-mail at the same time

Frazzing: when you are multitasking ineffectively

Gemmelsmerch: the ubiquitous force that distracts us from whatever we are doing with the desire to start doing something else

Doomdarts: suddenly remembered commitments such as a birthday or an invitation that had slipped our minds in all that frazzing and screensucking