[martharotter]

The best manager I ever had was amazing at this and the reason was simple: he understood downtime and he negotiated.

So when we were trying to ship something and everyone was working late nights and weekends, he'd give us several days off afterwards. Additionally we had flexibility such that I could offer to work a few weekends in a row in exchange for a long weekend a few weeks later.

It was a great system and his employees always respected him for it.