Making 20% Time Work
begriffs.com
begriffs.com
I'm not doing 20% time to trend shit for YOU on GitHub so that YOU can feel like you're doing something as a manager; intruding on and micromanaging "free time" until it's anything but "free".
I'm doing it to answer a burning question I have about something and do some exploration whether YOU think it's useful or not.
And before you whinge and bitch that I'm there to serve the company, a) if that's what you want then don't fucking act like its free time because it'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're also a precondition to keeping them happy and keeping them at all.
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.
Just not perhaps in the short 30 second timespan and timescale of an idiot clueless irritating manager.
Then don't call it 20% time. Fold it in as a "spike", in the normal sprint planning process.
The visceral reaction you're seeing to this system stems from the disconnect between the promise of "20% time" - that I get to work on something that I think is cool, without having to justify it to the company - and the reality, which is that it's just normal sprint work by another name.
If 20% time is subject to the normal planning and prioritization processes that the company uses for planning out the rest of its work, it raises the question of why you're placing that time into a separate bucket in the first place.
A cynical answer: Other companies have heard that Google does this cool thing called 20% time, and they want to be hip too, but don't want to give up any actual employee-hours to institute it. So instead they just rebrand some portion of their normal work as "20% time".
I provide my time in exchange for compensation and I do what I think is important with a little grey area that I also join in (for example, meetings).
Ultimately though I decide what I'm working on and this usually works because I'm in touch with what's going on, I'm good at my job, and I want to keep it. However I still spend most of my time working on my own ideas of what's important and how I'm going to achieve it. This works for me and it works for the managers who are strong enough to let go of micromanagement.
If the company feels that this goes wrong, or is out of touch with what they need, or simply (as has been the case once before) agree with exactly what I'm doing but feel the need to repeatedly "take control" and put structure on what I'm doing already, then this is fine and we can part ways.
But I don't go to work to serve, follow, or otherwise be a slave to others. I would rather kill myself than live feeling like that even for 8.5 hours a day. No.
This kind of touchy sensitivity to completely normal words is what I don't want in employees.
Some people fail to understand what a creative engagement that is. I'm not saying my code is fantastic or anything but it is an extremely emotionally driven art.
Some people only understand clocking in, working 8.5 hours, then going home. To me, I might be working 16 hours 4 days in a row to fix one function in some code I use that is driving me crazy; and if I can't then I'm just not going to be able to do my job anymore.
On the other hand once it's fixed it's one of the best tools the company has (in that it's doing something that few others in the industry are doing, even if... nobody except me is using or knows about it... because it's managing an aspect of my work and it's not important to them HOW I do it).
Fully agree with the premise — you are a servant meant to obey orders. But there's another conclusion: try to set aside time for freedom regardless of what Big Boss says.
For example, everything is negotiable: how much they surveil or micro-command you. Or if you consider yourself an adult, you simply do what you think best, with whatever expedient little tricks to keep the local bureaucrat happy.
(Obviously, this advice is not intended for those who identify with the boss. Most know the ways the deck is stacked against them, for example bosses colluding to weaken their bargaining power, or simply being born in a time in history where they must be servants to have a decent life.)
It truly is a two-way street and works best with cooperation and some give and take on both sides. Treating it as a purely antagonistic relationship is poisonous and generally not sustainable. If you think it's that bad, go someplace else.
Do companies act like it's "free" time? My impression was that it's intended to be free time to focus on projects of your choosing, but still things that will (or may) benefit the company. This is a far cry from free time to work on personal endeavors which you seem to be describing.
Here's a relevant quotation: "To start we ask each person to add to a vertical list of project names on the left side of a whiteboard. These are projects the group can work on. It’s fine, and in fact common, for people to list their own pet projects."
Also, I see no reason why you can't use this system and, at the same time, have someone work on whatever they want, if that's what they feel like.
It's an "enforced teamwork" situation (the article is pretty explicit about this up-front). If you want to work on a personal project, you're going to have to attract some others to join you.
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's pretty great and a key part of our culture that I'm happy we've been able to keep. It'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).
http://pages.kiva.org/buildkivablog/2011/02/10/kiva-engineer...
The entire point of the 20% concept to me is that I get to work on my own idea. I do not like your version that makes it a popularity contest between developers and their separate ideas. Most of the fun that can be found in 20% is the lack of constraints and oversight. The 20% should not have to be justified to anyone, let alone planned out and required to fit within a single sprint.
To be fair, I despise agile (or is it capitalized Agile?) in all its bullshit incarnations. The most interesting aspect of a 20% project is that the business keeps its filthy hands out of my time. Applying agile into the 20% makes me sick.
After thinking about it, the method proposed makes sense for structured companies trying to introduce the concept.
Unfortunately, I still think it's non-ideal, but it is a good start.
The primary selling point is always the removal of the "old waterfall method". And yet every single sprint, 20-40-80 hours worth of "more urgent tasks" get dropped in without proper grooming or advanced planning. Whether or not other tasks get removed from the sprint to equalize the incoming work does nothing to alleviate the frustration.
Every agile process I have seen always winds up being the same old bullshit of management having no discipline to actually follow the rules. We call it agile, but it's still just waterfall glossed over with a name - with none of the actual principles being taken seriously.
The only requirement is documenting how the project is good for Kiva. Some people would like to do something like say go learn Perl with their time. That's great for the person, but better covered by the professional development budget than innovation iteration. So, sometimes something like that gets shot down, but it's rare.
I've worked under 6-8 week fail fast R&D regimes before as well and have found they really help provide focus...though in all cases it seems to push the R&D effort much more towards an Applied R&D approach than a theoretical one.
http://scaledagileframework.com/innovation-and-planning-iter...
I wouldn't do that. I'd take some of my spare time, a few weekends, to document the idea and maybe hack together a prototype, and take that to "the right people". If they're going to be happy with the project then it's better to do it without pissing off everyone else.
I would rather see somebody genuinely advance in the organization by genuinely improving something (and taking some risk), while taking time from a stupid project, rather than by taking credit for work of someone else (but that never happens, right?). And in fact it's the latter people who get angry, so for that really doesn't matter on whose time you do it.
As for your suggestion, why is it OK for employer to steal employee's free time and not OK for employee to steal employer's time? We are talking about improvement to the employer's business, after all.
What you don't seem to realise is that there are no stupid projects. Someone in the business believes that the "stupid project" is a good idea that's worthwhile paying a developer to work on, and they've persuaded the people higher up that this is the case. If you just decide that it's not worth your time and something else is more important then you're effectively telling everyone who has agreed to let the "stupid project" go ahead that they're all wrong and you know best. That is not the best way to further your career.
Open a dialogue. Provide evidence. Don't just say "I know best!" and forge ahead while ignoring everyone else's input. If you're right then people will listen.
No one ever succeeds on their own.
It seems akin to saying there are no stupid moves in chess. Because every move is vetted by the player, and he has a good reason to do it. Unfortunately, people do make mistakes and at least, better moves - than the ones you decided to do - happen.
> you're effectively telling everyone who has agreed to let the "stupid project" go ahead that they're all wrong and you know best
But sometimes you do know best. I didn't say you have to drop work on the stupid project entirely, I just think you should be entitled to be part of the decision too.
Speaking about that, what is the theoretical ideal of how the hierarchical decision-making should look like? I mean, when someone decides things on higher level, how can they do that? If they were to made optimal decision, they need all the information that individual decision makers under them have. So isn't the decision they made always suboptimal? Isn't actually the best way how to make decision in a hierarchy at all to let all the deciders on a lower level decide what decisions have to be made on the upper level?
There should be a mathematical model supporting how hierarchical decision making works, but I have never seen one.
> That is not the best way to further your career
If you do what I suggested, you're taking a risk. It may give you a good result or a bad one, as it happens.
> No one ever succeeds on their own
Even if that is true, which isn't, you can still at least spark a success on your own.
Or you need to invest in automating some of your grunt work, so you can do the same work in less time. Laziness is a virtue.
The difference between a hirable employee and a fireable employee is not 20%. There is usually 2x or more of variation amongst people in a pay grade. As long as you're in that ballpark of productivity, you're fine. Personality conflicts will get you fired long before a 20% dip in stories checked in.
In fact, there's a good chance that taking the 20% of time off will actually increase your productivity the rest of the week. But if it drops you below the "worth their weight in pays stubs" line then you are already on very thin ice.
Wrong focus. Unplanned, but valuable and necessary side projects, that focus on the long term, setting aside for a moment that permanent focus on the short term next milestone next sprint next story next task next function next line of code cyclic trap of short term focus - that product managers (along with literally everyone else, myself included) fall all too easily into.
If my employer doesn't trust me to have some sense of what constitutes valuable and necessary, why the hell did they hire me in the first place? And why do I want to work there? And how soon will I be laid off, fired, or quit of my own accord - leaving for greener pastures where there's higher morale, and less micromanagement? These things will translate directly into better productivity, in turn translating into moving up the career ladder faster?
(I should note: I pick jobs where I consider my "20%" projects to be business relevant. That doesn't mean they're sanctioned.)
> I'd take some of my spare time
1) I can't focus on proper work projects outside of work. I've tried it. Even if I could, reducing my weekends to 1 day a week sounds like a great way to burn out. If somehow I don't burn out, bluring the line between work and play enough for the last day of the weekend I kept for myself to never quite feel like I've left work at work.
2) Prototyping is insufficient.
3) What spare time?
> writing code that will be owned by your employer
That's a feature. Do you have a copyright assignment clause in your contract for all your home projects? Is it legally enforceable in your jurisdiction? Nebulous. Here's the deal: I work on things at work, they get to own it - clearly and unambiguously. Best case scenario? I get recognition, praise, raises, bonuses, promotions, and they ask me to work on it even more. Worst case scenario? I'm off on an adventure, in search of employers that better value my talents. Win/win situation.
> all the while taking longer to do your assigned tasks and looking like you slack off for a day a week?
If it looks like you're slacking off, you're doing 20% time wrong. I have no games open, no social media, no reddit, no HN - my 20% time is sit down and write some code time. You'll hear my keyboard, and you'll see code if you look at my screen. In the lulls, you'll see me thinking hard, unaware of the world around me.
Even if I made it as regular as one specific day a week (I don't - it's hours here and there, fit in and around the normal ebb and flow of my daily work) I'd wager that fluctuation in stats-measured productivity would still get drowned out by the standard deviation of noise in normal work. Some days I commit 10, 20 things with relative ease - other times a single obscure bug wastes 2 weeks of my life to track down - and you're worried about a day a week?
> If they're going to be happy with the project then it's better to do it without pissing off everyone else.
Here's the thing: 20% time (possibly rogue, possibly unsanctioned) is how you pull this off. Which is easier to plan project schedules around: Consistent 80% time spent per week on the project, or sometimes 100% and sometimes 0%? Which sells better:
A) "I want to add an unplanned week to the project schedule so we can replace some terrible tools that we've been limping around with. No, it's not a customer requirement, why do you ask?"
Or:
B) "By the way, I wrote a spiffy new tool that replaces that old terrible one. We can now get those customer requirements that require the tool done faster. You're welcome!" (Unmentioned: You implemented it in about a week, amortized over the previous month or so.)
This is not universal, perhaps you ought to stop working for dysfunctional organizations
> The best policy for an engineer is the one I described
Again, not universally applicable. It might be the best policy for brogrammers.
Why? When you are knee deep in solving problems for an organisation you will often have good insights.
If you can't take the time to investigate these insights then you wind up a low productivity grunt.
Unlike the OP I am upfront about needing control over my workflow. If you need to micro-manage... no problem... I'll find a new job.
Because I work on huge swaths of the business and know where the huge piles of technical debt and risk are. I also know that people that are not rank and file engineers are hired for their ability to look good not do good. They can make polishing a turd look good by selling it to executives and having everyone else polish turds.
>What if everybody within the organisation did this?
Then you get a high functioning organization that makes billions of dollars.
>Why wait until you've pissed people off enough to get fired
Leaving early is a pattern for top people. They accomplish a lot and job hop before the unpleasantness starts. It can take up to six months for an organization to react negatively to the fact that some engineer actually got credit for something they initiated.
>start your own business where everyone gets free rein
Yeah, this is ideal but you need three or four years cash runway and that is very hard to get. Incubators and angels only give enough that you become dependent on financiers who have their own set of goals.
Saying "this project isn't important enough for someone like me" won't just annoy your manager. It'll annoy everyone, because someone else will have to pick up the work you dropped. You'll get the reputation for being awful to work with, and that is toxic to your career.
- Organized 20% time
First, for me, twenty percent time is that thing I work on when I'm blocked on something, have an inspiration, or just need a distraction from my major project.
Second, I can respect the organizational aspect and helping people understand how to contribute, etc, but really formalizing it in a table / chart and meeting to discuss it?
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.
I'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't have an adequate level of trust in exec mgmt that diverting their attention from core responsibilities wouldn't cause adverse personal reactions down the road. So sad. :(
From what I've heard from close friends who work at Google, this depends a lot on the team you're on and the manager you have. If you Google around a bit you'll see a lot of mixed feedback on the idea for this reason.
> And I don't know about you, but I'd rather the company did not know about anything I do on my own time and with my own resources, so that they couldn't lay any intellectual property claims to it.
They don't need to know about anything you do on your own time to lay IP claims on it. In California at least, there are very clear rules [0] that state that an employer can lay claim to IP under a number of conditions, none of which is that the employer knew it was happening at the time.
If it's anything worthwhile, it's likely to come up on your employer's radar at some point. It's better just to be upfront about such things instead of sneaking around. If you can't trust your employer you should probably find a new one.
[0]: http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=lab&gr...
It also isn't necessarily just "picking up other team's bugs" (I mean, you can if you want) - just last week my teammate finished up a 20% project to make a new UIView templating/auto-layout system for iOS, for the first example I can think of. This sort of thing is pretty common.
On Friday there are always too many things remaining in the sprint, and 20% time gets pushed off and continually forgotten about.
sigh
Fetishism of metrics and ITSM bullshit makes it harder to do these days, but it's still worth it for morale alone.
I think that acronym perfectly describes what a successful open-source project needs to thrive.
To hell with this wage employment bullshit. Keep your productivity and the fruits thereof for yourself. Don'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.
That sucks, that's not 20% culture.
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.
Groups working on things together for a week (~yearly 20% time) is more about exploring the team's creativity, exploring business or product ideas. It can be called internal pitch or demo days.
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.
I have written a couple of other points that are related about product development (e.g. moonshot, 10X, competitions), you may find them useful:
https://drillio.com/en/2016/best-practices-in-product-develo...
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.
If you only care about code and learning new APIs, that's your right. (I'd say do it at home.) If you want to ship something real with 20% company time? Get your project organized.
They give you 20℅ 'off' to do stuff they need?!
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't bother me if they can't use this......
Sounds like all this crap loke pingpong, Snacks and billiard tables to me :D
It's 20% of the time you're paid to work on things that aren't necessarily part of your core responsibilities but still have a plausible positive impact to the company, even if it's just goodwill and team building.
It was never claimed to be a 4 day work week.
Unfortunately we didn't have 20% time. It's one of those perks that actually sounds great to me (free food, meh).
Either way, it's still fucked that working and living isn't an even 50% split. It should be.
Hours of living on weekdays per week, exclude sleep: 6 * 5 = 30.
Hours of living on weekends per week, exclude sleep: 32.
Total hours living per week: 62
Total hours working per week: 50
You're right, it's not an even 50% split.
There's 6 hours of free time a day, plus 32 hours on the weekend.
Three nights a week I watch a movie or a couple of episodes on netflix (90 minutes), I play an hour or two of games (90 minutes), I write code for another hour or two (90 minutes), and the rest of the time is spent eating dinner.
Two nights a week, I forgo gaming and netflix to hangout with family and friends. I still manage to code. It may be on the train, but I do it.
And there's the weekend.
You know what? I have a good life, and fucked or not, I am grateful for it.
If a company is paying you for your time, what do you expect to be doing, if not to do what the company wants you to do?
If you want to not do what others want you to do, and still receive a regular pay check, that's called taking on welfare.
An even 50/50 split would be working no more days than you live--taking the day itself as the unit of measure. By the week, that means recognizing there's something inherently off with the notion that it's at all balanced to exchange 5 days to an employer so you can get 2 days to yourself in return.
If you want to make yourself feel better by counting how many hours you can squeeze out of a day for yourself, that's fine. I doubt I'm the only person who thinks that is no way to live.
In contrast to your example that, to me, seems insanely driven by the tyranny of the clock, a different take:
There are 365 days per year. When I decided years ago I wanted to achieve work-life balance, that left 182 days for working. By the typical American work week, if I was working a job, I'd be expected to surrender 251 days (for 2016). That's 70 days too many.
So, there are 183 days of free time per year.
Some of those days, I binge-watch Netflix. I don't even know how much time that totals.
Some days, I play games all night until the sun comes up.
Some days, I dabble with some code related to something I want to play around with, experiment, learn, rebuild, whatever.
Some days, I see the computer and say, "Fuck you, computer. It's gorgeous outside."
I wake up whenever by body wakes up. I shower. Grab some food or a meal shake. Head to the gym for a couple hours. Maybe take a nap, read, or just sit and breathe.
Some days I'm just sick of being at home, so I leave. I'm not counting any hours here, so I call up some friends out of town and say I'm coming their way for a couple days. I head out of state. I leave the country. I think of who I haven't seen in a while and get together with them.
> If a company is paying you for your time, what do you expect to be doing, if not to do what the company wants you to do? If you want to not do what others want you to do, and still receive a regular pay check, that's called taking on welfare.
That's an oddly binary and ideologically ridiculous notion you have there. As if there are no other ways to exist and subsist besides welfare and doing what others want you to do to receive a paycheck. I mean, come on. This is HN. This place exists for people who don't want to do what others want them to do in exchange for a paycheck.
P.S. I never said you shouldn't be grateful for having a good life. I think it's great when people recognize how good they have things, and are genuinely grateful for it. I was picking on a very subtle but important nuance in your original statement that I felt important to highlight. It's fine if you don't get the nuance, or don't care for it. For me, I like to remember where the agency and empowerment lies in my life. I'd never be able to stand a situation in which I actually had to think that an employer gave me a couple days of my life on the weekends before coming back to work.
Main point aside, I think it's important to realise our entire lives are given to us by the circumstances and fate of the universe itself. My job is one part of the universe.
How's the conversation going to go?
"Can I spend every Friday learning this new web framework? No, we don't use it, but I think you should be supporting me increasing my skill set. Yes I still expect to be paid."
Really?
I have the feeling most great ideas in our field get bastardized by people who know nothing about it.
People with families, hobbies (that aren't programming), classes to take, or even extra-long commutes are not overflowing with time to devote to side projects.
# One day a week:
Cons: people are off more on fridays, feel like they'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.
Pros: Simple, everyone gets time together. Easier to actually 'enforce' and not see it just disappear.
# One week/similar per longer time period:
Cons: Lots of time to stop everyone working, doesn't line up with all schedules, etc.
Pros: Longer to do things, everyone available together. Same pros as one day per week.
# Organise it yourself, completely freestyle
Cons: People don't actually do it most of the time, seems like they're taking time away from their main project.
Pros: Timing issues pretty much disappear, but things can always be put off. Easy for it to just be forgotten.
-----
The way I've seen it work well had these properties:
No fixed time or schedule, you booked off time to work on what you wanted.
Your manager can't indefinitely say "no", but if you're trying to book off the day of a release when you're planning a big release then they'd ask you to wait a bit.
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 "play around with X" or "try and make a Y"). You also needed to say if there was anything you required, and they'd help you sort this out.
The time is considered like holiday. You don't pull in workers from holiday to help out, you can't pull them away from the time they'd requested for the project.
You were encouraged to go and work in a different building/office if you wanted so you're not surrounded by people asking "quick questions".
You were required to put any code in a particular place.
You needed to briefly say how it went.
You had to be reasonably willing to say what you did in the next all-hands.
This was all fairly lightweight, booking time off wasn'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'd help out if you needed other equipment/etc.
Overall I think what will work varies massively on your workers and current workplace, it's vital to try a few different things and tweak as you go.
I know if I recruited for my company. I would have this 20% philosophy.
No.
IMO, the biggest benefit from a companies standpoint is people can try out new things without cluttering up the main product. Boring but works is often best for a company and terrible on peoples resumes.
Huh? You're getting paid for it. The company isn't stupid, they wont let you use their resources just so you can take all the credit.