Finally, you need to find a positive, business-like way to pitch your plan to your manager, co-workers, and clients. This need not be a career-limiting process, and I certainly don't want you to stomp into your boss's office, slam the door, and demand that your weekends are uninterrupted by calls about next quarter's budget revision. Treat this like a business proposal; develop your plan, anticipate and prepare to respond to objections, and work towards a negotiated agreement that meets your needs and those of your employer or clients.

If you're the manager
Smart managers realize that keeping everyone always connected and accessible can create the ultimate short-term-gain, long-term-pain situation. Here's what you do to keep your employees from burning out and becoming resentful.

First, try to set the right example. If you're sending email at one o'clock in the morning or checking voice mail seven times each weekend, you're sending a much stronger signal than your words to the contrary will ever convey. Maybe that always-on work style is right for you. That's fine, but be careful about how you might unknowingly be setting an example to be followed.

Second, watch out for what behavior you're reinforcing. If, for example, you give high praise to staffers who kept checking their email while on vacation, you're sending a not-so-subtle message about the desirability of doing just that.

Finally, play business-process detective. If you find your staff is routinely staying at the office till the early evening and then doing work at home till the wee hours, try to figure out what accounts for this workload. Is this an opportunity to streamline outdated work methods? Can you discern ways in which your people are working too hard or not cleverly enough? Are your internal or external clients forcing expectations on you that are no longer reasonable? You won't always be able to remedy these situations, but if you can understand the underlying causes of those always-on symptoms, you can probably make life better and the work more productive for everyone.

Back to the "good old days?"
Every time I hear a technophobe complain about how "computers have ruined everything," I have to laugh because that person probably wouldn't want to live in a world where all the computing and communications technologies we thrive on disappeared. But sentiments like those don't crop up without good reason, and the reason is usually that the tools that are supposed to make our lives easier sometimes seem to be doing anything but that.

The ultimate irony, of course, is that as devices like Palm handhelds become more powerful and more portable, we find ourselves depending on them in ways never anticipated. It isn't just the ability to check stock quotes and get instant messages, it's the ease with which you can look up a key client's spouse's name and hobbies in an instant on your Palm unit while waiting in the reception area, for example. These aren't just glorified address books and calendars. They're productivity tools that become part of the way we do our work.