A lot of people think that being productive is about working intensively for many hours without rest, but in fact it’s quite the opposite. As the novel Momo illustrates, good productivity comes from having a lot of free time, from having many and different experiences, and from introspecting and reflecting.
Really productive people are not busy most of the time. In my screenplay, Star Trek: “We, the Living Dead”, Q2, who is the world's oldest living organism and a member of the Q continuum (a guild of organisms who are extremely advanced, technologically) has this to say:
Q2: No [I’m not too busy]. Busy people are unproductive. We are very productive and so we’re almost never busy.
Katie Lucas wrote about why it is not a good idea to disable Internet access for employees, to avoid distractions. Quoting from there:
“There would be no Internet connection to private workstations in offices... The real advantage is the removal of the Big Distraction from programmers.”
You should probably put timelocks on the doors as well. You don’t want employees wandering outside the building looking at trees or anything while they take a break.
I mean, seriously. I’ve noticed there’s a strong correlation between environments which make these sorts of dumb decisions and suffer from crushing lack of imagination in what they do and environments that trust their staff to get on with the job.
Another illuminating story with respect to this, is that of “EA Spouse” who wrote a blog post on livejournal.com titled “EA: The Human Story” where she discussed the long hours working for EA. In response, Evan Robinson wrote “Why Crunch Mode Doesn’t Work?” where he explains why a 40 hour week yields the most productivity for humans.