IF you’re fed up of getting work emails at all hours then go and work in France.

Employers’ federations and unions across the Channel have signed a deal that aims to protect workers from getting emails outside working hours, which are deemed to be between 9am and 6pm.

Sounds like bliss, but it would never happen here, would it? Being welded to your smartphone and reacting to messages and emails as soon as they ping at you is the stuff of power games.

Being in demand makes you look more important than the people around you whose inboxes are empty, or so those whose phones are their office-on-the-move would have you believe.

We’ve all seen it. You’re in the bar after work, busily winding down from the day’s demands of answering all those emails, chatting to a colleague when their phone goes off.

A solitary finger goes up to still your babblings and then they’re off – phone clamped to their ear, they loftily stalk away to a quieter corner of the bar to emphasise how pivotal they are to whatever business issue is so urgent that it can’t wait until the following morning.

If it’s not phone calls, it’s emails. You’re back in the same bar, and your colleague’s attention is yet again not focused not on you but on their phone as they race to respond to each electronic ping.

Digital working time, our Gallic friends call it. They reckon that emailing outside office hours should only be done in exceptional circumstances, and they’re not alone. Car giant Volkswagen fixed it so their servers would stop sending emails half an hour after shifts ended and only begin again half an hour before they started again, a move that was adopted by Germany’s labour ministry.

It all sounds fine in theory but technology has made us slaves to real time, regardless of where we are or what we’re doing. Imagine – you’re just getting ready for bed and you get an email from a colleague.

Because they’re working so late you respond because at best you want to support them or at worst you want to demonstrate that you’re on the ball and ready to snap to technological attention at the pressing of a send button. Looks good when you have your performance review too - shows commitment to the work ethic, you see…

Or you start pinging off emails as soon as you’re out of the shower at 6.30am. Makes you look good, doesn’t it? Wow – aren’t you the important one? And because you’re seen to be working so early, showing such allegiance, such loyalty, such hard-working focus, it makes those around you who are actually all of those things too, feel inadequate and caught on the back foot. There again, that might have been your intention all along…

But on the other hand, there will be colleagues (who might just have a bit more of a life than you do because they stay in bed an hour longer and actually see the kids before heading out for another day of tiresome office one-upmanship) that see you for what you are – either egotistical and not to be trusted, or pathetically insecure and still not to be trusted….

That said, office and home life is increasingly blurred. I knew one office worker who made himself a little home-from-home den around his desk.

A packet of cornflakes lived in his drawer so he could breakfast while pinging his emails each morning. Dry cleaning was on a hanger nearby. A complete change of clothes was in another drawer, complete with electric razor, a toothbrush and toothpaste, and shower gel. And a towel was draped over the back of his chair.

For every person trying to impress the bosses by being surgically connected to their mobile phone there are another two who cyber-fritter their days away doing their on-line banking, booking holidays, organising their social life via Facebook and Twitter, arranging sessions at the gym and having ‘what d’you fancy for tea?’ conversations with their partners.

And it’s only when they get home that they actually get down to some meaningful work – this is where they catch up on their emails, write reports, have light-bulb moment ideas, and generally do enough stuff to stop them getting into trouble with the boss in the morning when they head back to their office home. As opposed to their home office…

It all makes a bit of a mockery of the French no-email-after-hours deal Given the blurred boundaries office-home world we live in, why have an office at all?