Over the past week I have come up with a radical solution to one of our most intractable problems at work: how to stop our jobs silting up our lives. We start the daily email orgy before we get out of bed in the morning and then pass the hours till dusk in tiresome meetings and video conferences, only to continue to commune with our smartphones late into the night. Every day feels like a marathon, only by the end of it we have hardly covered any distance.

There was much talk last week of a union deal in France banning workers from emailing each other out of office hours. My solution would be even more ambitious. It goes like this: everyone shows up at the office at a fixed time each morning and works for eight hours, after which they are free to slope off home again and do whatever they like undisturbed until the next morning.

This has been tried before. Nine-to-five has a long, splendid pedigree and used to work very well. Only in the past 15 years has it fallen out of fashion. So much so that when Marissa Mayer had the temerity last year to suggest that Yahoo workers put in an appearance at the office, half the world turned on her, calling her a dinosaur and control freak.