[curun1r]

I'm mostly the same, but I'm less militant about it and, instead, try to empower my team to handle it themselves. That said, I explicitly promise that any time outside of the normal 40 hours should be taken as comp time. So if someone spends 3 hours one evening dealing with a production issue or we have an upper-management-imposed push to get a feature out, there should be an equivalent number of hours taken off when the employee would have otherwise worked. And it's not time that can be banked to use to increase a vacation, it should be taken immediately and if I notice that someone isn't taking it, I'll tell them to leave the office. I've found that employees who aren't overworked can pull a 70 hour week and actually be that much more productive, but they can't do it on a regular basis and they need to recover afterwards.

Also, to combat the "time in seat" fallacy, I encourage my team to take walks every couple of hours, even if it's just around the office, though they should get outside if it's not raining. They can do it in groups, pairs or alone, but I've found that developers are more creative and better able to think through consequences/permutations when they don't spend too much time being sedentary. And it has the dual benefit of breaking the notion that sitting at your desk is the modern day timecard. As you've correctly noted, getting stuff done and achieving quality are what we should measure, not ability to spend time typing and looking at a screen.

[fma]

Walks are very productive in exercise and clearing head. I often try to take a walk with some people on my team. We just talk about whatever comes into our head - life, hobbies, etc. Sometimes it's work and we end up brainstorming.

We joke if we get caught walking we tell management that we're in a meeting.