Put your mobile on silent, leave your email alone and pay attention. We have found a way to cram an extra seven hours in our days without even realising it.

How? According to a think tank, the daily tasks many of us now perform would have taken 31 hours with the "primitive" technology we had to make do with a decade ago (yes, only a decade).

But there was one consolation - at least we talked more in those days.

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See if you recognise any bits of this lifestyle analysis from US think tank OTX. According to them our hectic day begins at breakfast, reading emails on a BlackBerry while eating toast.

Then we drive to work and hold a conference call via a bluetooth earpiece on the way - as well as trying to keep an eye on the sat nav, of course.

Work then continues to be a haze of meetings, emails, phone calls, voicemail, text messages and mobile calls demanding our constant attention.

But it is in the evening that the OTX study, involving 3,000 people across the pond, shows the most intense period for gadget-mania.

It found multi-tasking peaks between 7pm and 11pm when nearly half the households questioned watched TV while surfing the net, using their phones, ipods or other gadgets. Even eating came second to internet activities.

Dr Richard Baker from the Institute of Heraldic and Geneological studies in Canterbury, Britain's first centre for family history studies, said: "Our lives were simpler 10 and 20 years ago. But gadgets have released for us more time to do things we want to do.

"There is a danger you can become a slave to them as people expect an instant response, which can disrupt the pattern of your life. That is why I look at my email only at a given time each day.

Patrick Moriarty, one of the authors of the study, was reported as saying: "It makes you wonder what people were doing in the mid-1990s, when all the devices were far rarer.

"It must have been a lot quieter. Or maybe they talked to each other in the evenings."