It's more important to be healthy than to be a great programmer, we should be encouraging physical activity
That said, I'm not saying one should not have a healthy lifestyle. Sure, encourage more physical activity. But for the love of Great Maker, do not break up the time kids spend on intellectual tasks or hobbies into small chunks. You can do fitness rituals in 15-minutes stretches, but you can't do anything that requires any kind of creativity or focus in that time.
I do my programming in chunk of twenty minutes at a time.
Complete focus, no distraction.
If you can just sit down at random times and immediately code for 20 minutes with full focus, please tell us your secret. It sounds like a superhuman skill.
Good breaks:
- I walk around the building
- Watch a short comedy youtube video
- Scroll through memes/comics
- Read blog posts, usually ones that aren't too detail-oriented and with good stopping points (Coding Horror is a good example)
- Listen to an instrumental music song (no lyrics), close my eyes, maybe get some fresh air.
Bad breaks:
- Start a long email
- Other projects.
- Anything mentally taxing or stressful (don't pay bills on break, don't try to figure out what you'll have for dinner)
- Read an exciting book that you don't want to put down
Doing this helps me stay focused all day. Over an 8 hour shift I take breaks for approx 48-80 minutes (plus lunch), so at most a little over an hour is wasted--versus burning out after just a few hours, writing bad code that I then spend the next day cleaning up.
This further translates into me being able to work some more on some side projects when I get home without getting burnt out--and not always programming, but other mental work like writing, art, meal planning, etc.
Your selfish act of keeping your own body healthy with literally dozens of minutes of pointless kilocalorie-burning and wasted watts every week is a Nash equilibrium choice. Think of all the benefits to society that could be realized if no one ever needed to exercise to stay healthy. But if you're healthy now, you have no particular incentive to cheat death. You're taking brains out of that innovation lottery.
Come on, people. We can automate people out of their paying jobs, but can't automate exercise out of existence?!
Perhaps there is a sort of cognitive dissonance in play. People who have remained healthy their entire lives by disciplined application of exercise would undoubtedly feel betrayed and devalued when people can achieve the same results with drugs and implants.
/s
Programming and doing exercise are not entirely rivalrous tasks, but I can get a lot done in 3 hours if I am completely focused and entirely uninterrupted (even from self-sourced interruptions).