Making 20% Time Work

Wow I would absolutely hate this.<p>I&#x27;m not doing 20% time to trend shit for YOU on GitHub so that YOU can feel like you&#x27;re doing something as a manager; intruding on and micromanaging &quot;free time&quot; until it&#x27;s anything but &quot;free&quot;.<p>I&#x27;m doing it to answer a burning question I have about something and do some exploration whether YOU think it&#x27;s useful or not.<p>And before you whinge and bitch that I&#x27;m there to serve the company, a) if that&#x27;s what you want then don&#x27;t fucking act like its free time because it&#x27;s not, and b) irrelevant disconnected ideas and the curiosity to pursue them are not only the indicators of your smartest and best employees they&#x27;re also a precondition to keeping them happy and keeping them at all.<p>This time benefits me. There have been plenty of HN articles that breakthroughs come from tying together these previously thought irrelevant ideas. And in my experience researching some side project always comes to provide needed knowledge somewhere else eventually, always.<p>Just not perhaps in the short 30 second timespan and timescale of an idiot clueless irritating manager.

We have successfully pulled off 20% for 5+ years now at Kiva, doing some of the things suggested here.<p>However, the key thing we do is actually make the 20% be a full two-week sprint, it just happens every 5th sprint. That way, you can have the time to do some planning, suggesting, and documentation before setting out to build something and you get the full amount of time you needed to build it. We purposefully do try to keep features limited to something shippable during that time period, though some folks will spread it out over a few for bigger efforts. It&#x27;s pretty great and a key part of our culture that I&#x27;m happy we&#x27;ve been able to keep. It&#x27;s also produced some of the best features Kiva has (as well as served as a great time for engineers that like to tidy things to clean up the codebase).<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pages.kiva.org&#x2F;buildkivablog&#x2F;2011&#x2F;02&#x2F;10&#x2F;kiva-engineering-innovation-iteration" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pages.kiva.org&#x2F;buildkivablog&#x2F;2011&#x2F;02&#x2F;10&#x2F;kiva-engineer...</a>

How to make 20% time: Just do it. Don&#x27;t tell anyone. Tell that asshole trying to control your work to fuck off. When you&#x27;ve got something, tell the right people about it. Watch the other assholes at your job trip over themselves as they trash your work that you already got buy in from from the right people. Publish it. Launch it. Put it on your resume. You&#x27;ll probably get fired because the assholes will resent that you&#x27;re not under their control. So what? Make getting fired part of your career progression plan. Start your new, better job, rinse and repeat.

The method seems interesting from the &quot;help people be aware of what&#x27;s out there and how other people are working&quot; perspective...However, personally, I get lost on one major point in two ways:<p>- Organized 20% time<p>First, for me, twenty percent time is that thing I work on when I&#x27;m blocked on something, have an inspiration, or just need a distraction from my major project.<p>Second, I can respect the organizational aspect and helping people understand how to contribute, etc, but really formalizing it in a table &#x2F; chart and meeting to discuss it?<p>Maybe I am taking too strict of a view, but 20% time for me is that thing that is fluid and fills in the gaps or gives energy when I need a break from the day to day tasks.

This isn&#x27;t bad, per se, and it&#x27;s good to think about, but I want to throw it out there that the only reason 20% time works decently at Google is because of Google&#x27;s culture. By virtue of empowering employees to find problems and solve them, and being supportive of career dev &amp; internal transfer, and making boatloads of money, it makes it easy for the org to tolerate the slack this forces in defined teams. Almost none of the kinds of things that encourage 20% projects at Google typically exist in large enterprises, and when those companies try things like this it typically ends up being much more forced and much less organic, for better AND for worse.<p>I&#x27;m glad to read this post. I tried instituting 20% time in my previous job and almost no one took advantage of it. They just didn&#x27;t have an adequate level of trust in exec mgmt that diverting their attention from core responsibilities wouldn&#x27;t cause adverse personal reactions down the road. So sad. :(

20% doesn&#x27;t even work at Google. The reason being, if you care about your career, it ends up being 20% _on top of_ 120% you&#x27;re already putting in. And I don&#x27;t know about you, but I&#x27;d rather the company did not know about anything I do on my own time and with my own resources, so that they couldn&#x27;t lay any intellectual property claims to it.

Googler please chime in, but as far as I read it&#x27;s been dead for years. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;qz.com&#x2F;115831&#x2F;googles-20-time-which-brought-you-gmail-and-adsense-is-now-as-good-as-dead&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;qz.com&#x2F;115831&#x2F;googles-20-time-which-brought-you-gmail...</a>

Another thing we did that really helped - make Monday 20% day not Friday.<p>On Friday there are always too many things remaining in the sprint, and 20% time gets pushed off and continually forgotten about.

Having worked at both Google and Facebook I prefer Facebook&#x27;s strategy of &quot;hackathons&quot; and &quot;hackamonths&quot; to encourage people to sometimes work on different projects than they usually do, to mix it up. Hackathons (1-3 days at FB) are cool because they really encourage you to work with a new set of people. Hackamonths are usually tied to, &quot;this project is with a different team and if it&#x27;s going well I would join this other team&quot;. I think that is cool because they make it explicit that maybe your side projecty thing is going to turn into your real project. The setup is aimed at a similar thing to 20% time and I think it is overall more effective.

There are IT departments inside of non-IT companies that would love to have this sort of luxury. But with department heads that would have their heads explode if you try to explain this to them.<p><i>sigh</i>

I love this BASEDEF acronym. I have an IRC bot that I&#x27;ve been working on for 3 years on Github. I&#x27;ve also tossed it on up-for-grabs.net. About 7 people have submitted contributions, I think because of up-for-grabs.<p>I think that acronym perfectly describes what a successful open-source project needs to thrive.

I have 80% time, i.e. I only spend about 20% of my time on my clients.<p>To hell with this wage employment bullshit. Keep your productivity and the fruits thereof for yourself. Don&#x27;t give them away for a pittance to an employer, who probably also made you sign an agreement that they get to take anything you make, whether you made it on their time or not.

As an IT manager; the biggest problem with 20% time I&#x27;ve seen is people using for 80% time stuff. Like, critical training they should have gotten as part of normal work, etc.<p>That sucks, that&#x27;s not 20% culture.

There&#x27;s a certain irony in the title, as this reads to be a how-to guide to making 20% time <i>work</i>.

There are many, slightly different ways to describe innovation.<p>I have found that 20% of the time project is about personal motivation to show on something different (than my usual tasks) that I can do it or make it better. Managers only need to enable it, and shall not force it. If the individual is not motivated to show that it can do better, let it be, because they may be just fine with their normal work.<p>Groups working on things together for a week (~yearly 20% time) is more about exploring the team&#x27;s creativity, exploring business or product ideas. It can be called internal pitch or demo days.<p>Some ideas need time to get some exploring, some trial and error, some fiddling, some long discussions, and may not be doable in a week (wall clock time). Due to their different nature, they will result in different products.<p>I have written a couple of other points that are related about product development (e.g. moonshot, 10X, competitions), you may find them useful:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;drillio.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;2016&#x2F;best-practices-in-product-development&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;drillio.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;2016&#x2F;best-practices-in-product-develo...</a><p>Re: article. I think the author is using the 20% projects as a team building exercise. It could be working for that purpose, and maybe for some incremental changes, but will not explore innovative ideas.

Creative processes actually CAN be well-organized and fun at the same time. Just look at hackathons, which teams get stuck halfway and which teams are productive and take the prize home?<p>If you only care about code and learning new APIs, that&#x27;s your right. (I&#x27;d say do it at home.) If you want to ship something real with 20% company time? Get your project organized.

I don&#x27;t get it...<p>They give you 20℅ &#x27;off&#x27; to do stuff they need?!<p>Either they want me to solve their problems and plan this with me to do it like normal work, which IT IS or they want me to do my own thing and don&#x27;t bother me if they can&#x27;t use this......<p>Sounds like all this crap loke pingpong, Snacks and billiard tables to me :D

I read this less as the company trying to control your 20% time, and more as the company making your 20% a first-class citizen among its other projects, by using the same resources and processes.

20% time is important because not everyone has a ton of free time to improve their skills and do whatever they want to.<p>People with families, hobbies (that aren&#x27;t programming), classes to take, or even extra-long commutes are not overflowing with time to devote to side projects.

I already do that, and My boss is aware. When it is necessary to fix things quickly or do scouting or in general problem solving your time invested returns, but you are faster.

Love the idea of trying to a) make 20% time better and b) encourage it to be open source. Wonderful stuff!

I work in a big corporation and I am doing 90%. no one seems to care and I am enjoying it very much

Making 20% Time Work? But the 80% is already work.

I&#x27;ve seen this tried in a few ways that didn&#x27;t really work out and one that worked well: (edit - this is always highly dependent on the people and small differences, this is only my experience of 10&#x2F;20% time that I&#x27;ve actually participated in and the issues that appeared at my workplace)<p># One day a week:<p>Cons: people are off more on fridays, feel like they&#x27;re missing out. Some things need more than one day, other priorities pop up a lot on fridays. Hard to force people to suddenly switch for one day.<p>Pros: Simple, everyone gets time together. Easier to actually &#x27;enforce&#x27; and not see it just disappear.<p># One week&#x2F;similar per longer time period:<p>Cons: Lots of time to stop everyone working, doesn&#x27;t line up with all schedules, etc.<p>Pros: Longer to do things, everyone available together. Same pros as one day per week.<p># Organise it yourself, completely freestyle<p>Cons: People don&#x27;t actually do it most of the time, seems like they&#x27;re taking time away from their main project.<p>Pros: Timing issues pretty much disappear, but things can always be put off. Easy for it to just be forgotten.<p>-----<p>The way I&#x27;ve seen it work well had these properties:<p>No fixed time or schedule, you booked off time to work on what you wanted.<p>Your manager can&#x27;t indefinitely say &quot;no&quot;, but if you&#x27;re trying to book off the day of a release when you&#x27;re planning a big release then they&#x27;d ask you to wait a bit.<p>To get it you have to say what it was you wanted to do, but this only needed to be a brief sentence on a wiki somewhere (could be &quot;play around with X&quot; or &quot;try and make a Y&quot;). You also needed to say if there was anything you required, and they&#x27;d help you sort this out.<p>The time is considered like holiday. You don&#x27;t pull in workers from holiday to help out, you can&#x27;t pull them away from the time they&#x27;d requested for the project.<p>You were encouraged to go and work in a different building&#x2F;office if you wanted so you&#x27;re not surrounded by people asking &quot;quick questions&quot;.<p>You were required to put any code in a particular place.<p>You needed to briefly say how it went.<p>You had to be reasonably willing to say what you did in the next all-hands.<p>This was all fairly lightweight, booking time off wasn&#x27;t a difficult thing and getting approval was just a quick chat about what you were planning. You could grab a few days or an afternoon, and they&#x27;d help out if you needed other equipment&#x2F;etc.<p>Overall I think what will work varies massively on your workers and current workplace, it&#x27;s vital to try a few different things and tweak as you go.

I&#x27;ve never met anyone who has this luxury, quick poll: Do you have 20% time?

Just keeping it 100: if you come up with a really good idea, (orthogonal to the companies business) that can make a lot of money in 20% time and give it back to your company rather than starting your own shit with it, you&#x27;re stupid. Or just have low testosterone.