Many people will agree that youngsters are exceptionally good at multitasking: executing two or more interrelated or disassociated job processes. They can use IMChat, write emails, surf the net, talk on their cell phone while going through their notebooks.

Ever noticed someone ahead of you in traffic driving unsteadily? They must be multitasking—driving, reading a telephone number, dialling a cell phone or having a conversation.

Studies consistently show that when you try to do a number of things simultaneously—eating, handling the radio or texting—while driving, you put yourself and other traffic at considerable risk. A CPU with multi-threading allows the processor to multitask without an additional processing core but a human brain has certain limits. An interesting new device, USBFever’s Car Windshield Mount for iPad that can be mounted on the windshield or dashboard of a car allows watching movies and checking emails while driving. Mounted in front of you, it obscures your sight and attracts your attention to movie scenes or unread emails while you also have to focus on the road all the time.

For The New York Times, multimedia producers Gabriel Dance and Tom Jackson have designed an interactive distraction game in consultation with David Strayer, a psychology professor who has researched on cell phone use and driving safety, and David Meyer, a professor of mathematical and cognitive psychology.

The game simulates speeding through a number of gates. You watch for the lighted green number and press the correct number to move to the lane with the open gate. While you navigate, a cell phone on the screen allows you to read and respond to text messages. The gates are spaced at uniform intervals to measure reaction time and compare it to others.

“We weren’t trying to be an exact simulation of driving down the highway or the road—it’s not realistic to have all those gates and people often text in shortened words,” says NYT web producer Danielle Belopotosky. “It is a game to give you a sense of how a distraction can decrease your ability to react quickly.”

Time magazine has coined a term, ‘Generation M’ (M for multitasking), for over stimulated teenagers who are constantly busy in such activities as instant messaging (IM), Facebook, Myspace, iPods, cell phone and blogs. Meyer frequently tests ‘Gen M’ students and sees them as no different except for their ‘mystique’ as master multitaskers.

“You can’t simultaneously be thinking about your tax return and reading an essay, just as you can’t talk to yourself about two things at once,” he says.

“To improve your multitasking skills, pay very careful attention to how tasks are divided into various subparts. Tasks have natural breakpoints in them, where one part of a task is joined to the next. If you can manage to stop at these breakpoints when switching between tasks, that's better than if you stop in midstream while some part of a task is still under way. By practising this, you can learn to schedule actions in tasks so you become better at switching efficiently from one task to another.”

A study reported in the British Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and reported in the BBC News Blog suggests that three skills are critical for successful multitasking. They are: (1) paying attention and screening out irrelevant information; (2) organising working memory; and (3) ability to switch tasks.

The study identified two groups of people—multitaskers and non-multitaskers and applied a psychological test of skill to each group. In each case, non-multitaskers outperformed multitaskers.

Interestingly, the high multitaskers were lousy. Low multitaskers thought they were worse at it and high multitaskers thought they were gifted at it.

While multitasking ability may be useful, excessive multitasking can make it difficult to get things done. Maybe it is time to adopt a single task approach. Single tasking is the process of tackling one task at a time and moving on to the next once the first is complete.

The process of single tasking may require even more self-discipline because you have to make sure that you prioritise your task very carefully and ignore any urge to procrastinate. But that is what scientists have been doing most of the time and professors are famous for: ignoring everything else except the task they are focused on.