[DeathArrow]

Can't that extra be something unrelated to your current project?

I like how Google lets employees use 20% percent of their time to work on other subjects that their current projects. More companies should do this. The value is huge: less bored developers, less burnt out developers, innovation and development of potential very useful features for the company.

[bob1029]

This is how I do it. I used to try to put my extra into our product directly, but eventually learned how disruptive this pace was for the team.

Now, I spend maybe 1 day a week working on a personal side project where I can get all that energy out of my system. Every 3 months or so, I will find a very useful nuget in the side repo that I can gently introduce to our product repo.