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"Pay me overtime for using my Blackberry!" - exec

Is mobile email a way of getting senior executives to do more unpaid overtime? or a productivity aid for the modern, web-based worker? Columnist Martin Courtney reckons it's a con:

What is needed is a clever piece of enterprise software that records each time an employee logs in to check email, and tots up the number of minutes or hours they spend outside normal office hours reading or replying to work-related messages.

Courteney's column quotes a survey published by AOL into "email addiction" which headlines the fact that "more Americans than ever before are using portable devices to keep tabs on their email throughout the day and night, and from virtually anywhere – bed, cars, bathrooms and even church."

But the survey sponsor, Regina Lewis, AOL Online Consumer Advisor, suggests a course in time management, saying: "Email addiction has less to do with curbing an obsession than it does with proper time and email management." Her solution is to actually spend less time doing email.

Courteney's solution is likely to increase the amount of emailing - if anybody were to take it seriously. He wants an email time monitor inserted into all mobile (and other) email clients, showing when, and how long, the exec was dealing with messages - and then a scale of payments  relating that to the amount of "overtime" performed.

As one sysadmin remarked: "I can just see my boss authorising the writing or purchase of such a utility, with the object of getting our users to waste even more time than ever on mail, and increasing the payroll budget at the same time - probably the day after they build an office swimming pool with attached bar."