This is quite sensible; if my manager is leaning over my desk asking for that TPS report, I'm more likely to drop what I'm doing and give it to him than if he's

This is quite sensible; if my manager is leaning over my desk asking for that TPS report, I'm more likely to drop what I'm doing and give it to him than if he's asking from 20 miles away. In the latter case, I can tell him I'll e-mail it to him, and buy myself time to get to a natural breaking point. Multiply that by however many people are on your development team, and the manager has to wait all day to get his TPS reports. There is a significant distinction between personal productivity and team productivity, and the wise manager knows how to leverage the former to increase the latter. It bears repeating that the wise programmer knows that he must occasionally sacrifice the former to enhance the latter as well, if he hopes his employer will continue to give him lots of money for having fun with computers. That said, the "war-room environment" is fraught with connotations that just scream "inept management" to me. If your developers are under that kind of stress for long periods of time, you're doing it wrong, and you're deleteriously affecting not only their personal productivity, but the team productivity as well.