"Then is it cool if I skip a few meetings to volunteer to help the homeless?" Yes and my last job encouraged us to take days off for local volunteering work. What most of us do isn't that important in the grand scheme of things. If you can make somebody's day better or easier, why not. The software everybody is making isn't really going to come out that much faster because you took some time out of a single day your week to do anything else but work.