FOR some people, the phrase "work-life balance" is meaningless as their work is life and their life is work.
The body may be home with the dog and television, but the mind is still a whirr of stock options and invoices and client meetings.
The clock may have ticked past five, but the working day is never over. These people are the beating heart and lifeblood of any office. They are the people who keep moving because if they stop they die.
They must have rejoiced when the cellphone, that clunky one-note communication tool of yesteryear mutated into the all-singing, all-dancing multipurpose supercomputer that we all stash in our pockets and dismiss with the name "smartphone".
Suddenly, every incoming message could buzz satisfyingly and instantaneously on the hip.
Responses could be drafted and sent without having to do anything so time-consuming as switch on a laptop.
These people became plugged in, forever connected to the world of work. For them, there could be no greater joy.
I am not one of these people.
There is a dark god, Productivity, to whom economists, employers and politicians pray.
These warrior-priests say the baleful smartphone and its chirruping, You Have Mail call, increases productivity.
Hours previously wasted going to the park, seeing your children, eating in restaurants, drinking single malt, staring raptly into your lover's eyes and so on can now be spent replying to the deputy chief vice-president of overseas sales about the annual net usage statistics.
And thus the great wheel of the economy turns, greased with the sweat of the worker, just as it should. All hail Productivity.
In Germany, though, they appear to be coming round much faster to my way of thinking.
The country's labour minister, a wise and far-sighted woman called Andrea Nahles, has proposed an "anti-stress law" which would make it illegal for bosses to e-mail staff outside working hours. It is already illegal in this enlightened Teutonic wonderland to expect staff to respond to e-mails while on holiday, but the great Frau Nahles wants to push further to protect more German lives from the all-consuming ping of the in box.
She has a point. Workplace stress is an acknowledged cause of mental illness, especially anxiety and depression. I am not sure she is right in saying that there is an "undeniable link between having to be constantly available and the rise in mental illness", but it would not be a surprise to find out that workplace stress is made worse by the workplace following you home nowadays.
The relationship between working hours and productivity - and the modern smartphone world - is complicated.
According to The Economist, Germany has one of the most productive workforces in the world and, as it happens, some of the shortest working hours. There is a similar story throughout the West. The countries that work smartest work shortest.
Greek workers have some of the longest hours in Europe, but do the least with them. And despite the rise of the always-in-touch world, we work on average fewer hours than we did in 1990.
But spending less time in the office is less meaningful if, when you are out of the office, you are still expected to check your e-mails every half hour.
Hence Nahles's point that time off should be time off, not merely a different way of working.
The sad fact is that this probably cannot be enforced.
And your other bosses that you have not dobbed for e-mailing you after hours would not be very inclined to offer you much in the way of promotions and pay hikes,
But whether or not Nahles's proposal can work, the point is that someone is trying.
And they are trying for the sake of our health. So next time I log in on a Monday, and see the 250 e-mails some evil whip-cracker wanted me to have read over at the weekend, I can think: in Germany, they want to throw people like you in jail. - The Daily Telegraph, London