Honestly, 1 hour a week is not enough. I do 1 hour every morning and have benefitted tremendously from it. Before you scoff that I must not have enough work, n

Honestly, 1 hour a week is not enough. I do 1 hour every morning and have benefitted tremendously from it. Before you scoff that I must not have enough work, note that I've developed and built several large web applications for my fortune 500 company all on my own, I've been busy. You can make 1 hour a day work simply by just working it out so that you're not pulled into meetings constantly. If at work, you can manage to be on 1 or 2 projects only, and each has defined meeting times (like standups or weekly progress reports), then you can budget your time to code. At my job, we assume 6 hours of coding per day, 2 for meetings. I make that 5 hours of coding per day, and 1 for learning. No one notices, and if they did no one would care because the 1 hour I take every morning to explore gets me in a great place to spend the rest of the day being really productive. The benefits have been tremendous, my code is of higher quality. I'm becoming a technical leader to my team. I've done the most presentations on new technology and I've gotten to architect our apps more. All because I work less at work, and explore more.