RECENTLY Yahoo and Google announced more bells and whistles to their mobile internet services. Microsoft has confirmed the purchase of TellMe, a mobile search company, for over 800m. In the next few weeks, YouTube will release a version of its website that you can access on your mobile phone.

Here in Ireland, all of the mobile operators are offering or will soon offer broadband-like speeds for your mobile.

After years of dealing with clumsy interfaces and slow speeds, the richness of the modern internet can now be experienced on your phone, but is this increased connectivity away from the home and office a good thing?

Gone are the days for business people when work was a nine-to-five routine with weekends off. Thanks to mobiles, Twitter, blackberries and laptops with mobile data cards, being away from the office just means you are not physically there but you are still in touch thanks to technology.

Humanity has never been so connected and distracted.

With mobiles now able to offer even more ways to distract us, will we give adequate attention to the task in hand?

Last November in Britain, a sales executive was jailed for two years for dangerous driving causing the death of another driver. Two minutes before the fatal head-on collision, he had sent a text message, and at the exact moment of impact, while overtaking another car, he was receiving a reply to his text. Using your mobile in your car without a handsfree kit might be banned, but how many people do you see taking calls on their phones while commuting?

In the book Smart Mobs, Howard Rheingold starts by revisiting Tokyo's Shibuya Crossing where he watches thousands of people rapidly traversing a multi-streeted pedestrian crossing. Where before he observed people on their phones or chatting to each other while hurriedly crossing, this time he sees that most people have their eyes on their tiny-screened phones. That was in 2000 and the rest of the world had not yet caught up with the mobile fascination in Japan.

Today these people are texting, writing emails and watching videos on their phones.

Closer to home, look around at any busy pedestrian crossing today and look at how many are crossing the street while texting. Look at the truck drivers waiting at the lights, thumbing away on their phones and witness even couriers on bikes (if they obey the lights) texting. How many are actually paying attention to their surroundings? Their bodies might be physically there but their attention and priorities are somewhere else.

Today, we are doing multiple tasks but each one demands our attention and brain power. Multi-tasking is about doing micro-tasks while another one of your tasks is running and doesn't require a lot of thinking.

Doing some filing while the photocopier is copying 100 pages is multi-tasking. An email, an IM, a text, all coming in at the same time means our brain is racing.

Each one requires a conscious decision and an action.

This always-on interaction with various information streams has been termed 'continuous partial attention', but can we take it?

The benefits of a workforce being able to do additional tasks while away from their desks are obvious, but is too much connectivity unhealthy? Business psychologist Annette Clancy thinks, like everything else, excess is bad.

"A workforce that is 'always on' is being asked to meet an unsuitable and unsustainable need for instant gratification that need simply cannot and should not be met because to do so infantilises others and absolves them of the responsibility of managing their expectations and needs.

Do we really want a world full of greedy two-year-olds?

Because if we do, being always available, 24/7 is a guaranteed way of getting it."

Business consultant Krishna De thinks we are becoming more stressed as we become more connected.

"The one thing we never seem to have enough of is time, yet it's the one commodity that we all seem to crave more of. But time is finite and the one resource that when used can never be recovered."

De thinks we need to learn new ways of prioritising, of managing time and importantly, of learning how to switch everything off.

Ironically, in some corporate circles, not having a business phone is the new status symbol. It is now a bonus that you cannot be contacted outside office hours. Perhaps we should all give ourselves a daily bonus by turning off and tuning out once outside the office door?