Round-the-clock timetable is changing our way of life. The 21st century office never leaves us. We bring our wireless cell phones and notebook computers when vacationing. There are people who bring their cell phones into concert halls and auditoriums. For them, missing an important business message is not a miss that is remediable. The round-the-clock hyperspeed "Internet time" won't give us quiet time for resting and thinking. An increasing number of business executives have taken to bragging about how much sleep they get. For them, the ultimate status symbol is the power to live by nature's clock rather than the Net's clock.

Of course, there is no going back to the agrarian past. I think the right attitude is to go with the tide of the times and live as a master of our time without submitting to a kind of 21st century enslavement. We will learn to arrange our lives according to our nature's clock within the framework of the 24-hour timetable of the Net, rather than chasing after the Net's sun that never sets, for such an act is, undoubtedly, not only a sign of incompetence but also an act of burning the candle at both ends.