I think that every programmer, who has been in the field for more than 3 years, spends 2/3 of their day playing games or surfing the web, and the other 1/3 of their day actually programming. Now you might be asking yourself, "Why?" Well, I feel it has to do with the fact that if we didn't we would burn out of minds in the first 3 months were are on the job. If I am really working on a project and focus on it for more than 4 - 5 hours, I start to develop a terrible headache. At that point, I am useless for the rest of the day as far as anything. It is like running your car engine's rpms in the red. For a short amount of time, it won't hurt the car at all, but the more time that it spends in that state, things start to break down. Either your car will start to overheat, break a bolt, or just blow up your engine depending on the amount of time and how hard you push it. The same goes for the mind of the programmer. To keep our brilliant ideas flowing from our brains, we have to find time to idle our brains which tends to be done with the internet or games.
For me, I find that my photography is the gear shift that I need. It is not uncommon for me to spend the first hour of my day catching up on the photography forums, looking around Flickr, or reading other photography blogs. The rest of the day is then a mixture of this and actual work. And it is not just me, either. I look around at the other programmers here in the office, and 6 out of 10 times, they are also either playing flash games, browsing forums, or just listening to music. We don't just do this because we can, but because we have to.
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