Auto pillock
When are people going to stop being macho about hand flying.
Most of you with a reasonable amount of flying/airline experience should be able to recognise when your workload is increasing.
When this starts to happen ask yourself if it wise to continue with this ritual because your company says you can, or if assigning mundane tasks to the autopilot so you can pull your weight on the flight deck and helping your colleague is a better idea.
I personally love disconnecting the automatics and polling around the sky as "raw" as possible. I feel enormous satisfaction in accurate raw data manual flying.
But,
There is a time and a place to do this which is not easy to define through sops. Beacause sops are usually constructed in a nice air conditioned office on the ground and normally written as a policy they can only cover so many situations. The rest is airmanship.
My instinct has been used on many occasions when deciding on when to engage and disengage automatics.
The auto pilot was designed to help us. It is one of many tools of our trade and that is how it should be treated.