If you lead any kind of development then I'm talking to you, and I am telling you to just stop on Fridays. Deliver what you have finished, refresh your mind and come back to a clean slate on Monday.

There is no denying that the countdown to Friday afternoon is a huge part of our culture. So make use of it. Take the powerful existing message of "Looking forward to the weekend" and tweak it to "Looking forward to delivering and then taking a well-deserved weekend". No longer an arbitrary deadline, but a deadline your team is already emotionally invested in.

On top of this, as a developer myself, I know that nothing is scarier than putting your product in front of a customer. All of your mistakes, both in idea and execution, will be revealed. But doing it at least once per week means your mistakes will be small and your corrections will be based on the hard facts of customer feedback.

Admittedly, there is a time and place for just digging in to a problem and not stopping until it is done. This will give you incremental improvements. But mostly it is a performance you put up to show your dedication to your boss.

But success comes from coming up with a new idea. Something that may be small, but which changes the game. And new ideas do not come from a myopic brain drained by non-stop work. If I had a penny for every time I walked into the office, realizing that yesterday's all-day struggle was just a dead end, and that an elegant solution was just 30 minutes away.

By finishing what you start by Friday, you come in with a fresh perspective on Monday. You are ready to challenge not just the status quo, but also your ideas from last week which are now old news.

Less theatre. More progress.