AS WE PEER through the thicket of Hurricane Katrina remembrances and gear up for the five-year anniversary of 9/11, it's easy to forget that Monday is Labor Day, the holiday created to honor the American worker by offering us a day of rest from our toils.

But isn't that what progress is all about? Thanks to cellphones, pagers, e-mail, text messaging, BlackBerrys and various other life-improving technologies, we can shill for our employers while simultaneously camping/sky diving/undergoing scheduled C-sections.

Besides, what better way to pay homage to the American worker than to keep working on the commemorative day? Memorial Day, after all, does not merely signal the OK to wear white shoes; it is supposed to honor fallen war veterans. And what did we do last Memorial Day but make more of them when two soldiers were killed in Iraq?

As stressful as Labor Day can be, it hardly compares to the days leading up to it, when we're forced to work overtime — often picking up the slack for vacationing colleagues — to keep from falling behind in the wake of the holiday. In some businesses (such as, ahem, the newspaper business) there's simply no getting around this extra work; last Labor Day, thousands of journalists were working around the clock (often without electricity) reporting on Katrina.

But even when business is moving at its usual clip, many of us suffer from what Joe Robinson, a work-life coach who runs a Santa Monica company called Work to Live, calls "the paranoia of productivity." The fallacy, Robinson explained to me, is that we think that because we're using our minds rather than our bodies, we can sit in a chair for 12 hours and work nonstop.

"But there's actually evidence that the mind goes before the body," he said. "We're in this vice-grip of spiraling work hours right now because there's all this technology that allows us to work every waking minute," he says. "And no one wants to talk about it because they're afraid they'll look like wimps."