Time Allocated To Research
Be it tooling around with a potentially usable new tool/technology or reading up on a methodology, time to research is critical.
Anecdote:
When I started my current job, Fridays were terrible because all of the evening telemarketing staff worked the day shift on Fridays. I started working onat home on Fridays and took 50% of mythat time at home and devoted it directly to researching. I got up to speed on the codebase, the vendor tools, methodologies that we used in no time and discovered some new techniques/processes that I ended up putting in place to great effect.