Crunch schedules are often the result of poor management (at many points along the chain). My group seems to handle the balance reasonably well--we certainly g

Crunch schedules are often the result of poor management (at many points along the chain). My group seems to handle the balance reasonably well--we certainly go through crunch times (either because of deadlines, or customer requests), but when we are outside those times, we can spend some of our time playing with things. There's no guarantee that we get some percentage of our time each week or month to play with new things, but if we feel we can put it into our schedules, we have the freedom to do it.