Nine To Five

Susan Wilson Solovic likes her sleep and her time off. But it wasn't long ago that the hour between 2 and 3 a.m. was her prime e-mailing time, and vacations were little more than a different setting in which to work.

"People thought I was crazy," says Solovic, the chief executive of Small Business Television Network, a Web-based news and information service for entrepreneurs. But, she says, "our company was growing rapidly, and my life became completely consumed by the business."

Five years after the launch of SBTV.com, Solovic approaches work far differently. For starters, she is no longer at the mercy of her e-mail and refuses to take projects on vacation.

"I was wearing too many hats, and it took a toll. People started shutting me out ofat home in the morning to spend time with her son, Jacob, and she guards her weekend by logging off the office computer from Friday afternoon to Sunday evening.

Another, Malika Saar, 38, executive director of the Rebecca Project, a Washington, D.C.-based human rights organization, recently turned down an invitation to give a keynote address at a conference that would have kept her on the road for three days. (She enlisted a coworker with older children and more travel flexibility to give the speech in her stead.)

Attitudes like these mark a dramatic reversal from the extremes of the past decade, in which career success was directly tied to being constantly accessible. (Hop on a plane to China at a moment's notice? No problem!)

That was especially true for women, who