Today I was thinking about how in our current society everyone is trying to follow as many productivity tips and hacks as possible. Being idle, just sitting around and maybe play chess is really looked down: everybody must be 100% busy all the time.

Apart from the mental health implications of the "always-on" society (we should always give prominent priority to mental health though!) there is a clear area where being 100% busy will hurt:

When a team needs to factor in projects that need to start immediately they must have idle members ready to take the task.

If you have a large system that requires constant improvement, but also maintenance, making everybody having a large backlog in front of them sounds very efficient; no one is "wasting company resources" on being idle.

On the other hand what would happen when a new project or a huge bug appears? People who had those large backlog items need to stop working on those (if possible at all), change context and start working on the new issues, while the old issues won't go away on their own.

Therefore we can really see that a team that tackles immediate tasks must have an overhead of members that can start working any time. Therefore they will have more free time and we shouldn't be grumpy about that.

Making idleness a value

In my opinion, tactical resting of team members is not a bad deal at all: be ready any time, but you can spend the time on your own. You can also use those times to learn new stuff, take on creative refactors and so on with the premise of working in a manner that can be dropped immediately when the task appears.

In the end, what is a bigger waste? Losing a new project, or giving some more free time for engineers?