You have probably heard about Google’s 20% time; where Google engineers can spend a fifth of their working time doing personal projects, while spending 80% of their time working on what they’re paid for. Well, for the last few weeks I have been following that philosophy, with a twist; I’ve been using my 20% time working on deliverables and 80% of the time working on random things.

It’s not really that I’m spinning my wheels, I mean I’ve accomplished a lot with my 80% time. I’ve fixed up my site a bit and added some cool functionality (that you can’t see — but I digress), I’ve forged ahead and started writing bits of my potential thesis, I’ve added content and invited people to Facebook, and I put significant mileage on my iPod. I was spinning my wheels though, getting some stuff done because there was no schedule, deliverables, or project plan for the stuff I’m working on.

So what is it exactly that I’m working on? Well one of the things is a demo exhibit for the upcoming CASCON 2006. When I first signed up for it at the end of August, I had a clear definition of what I would end up doing, and about two months to do it. But as things went, and the date got closer, people realized that they had all sorts of agendas they wanted to thrust into my demo, so I got to interact in a lot of meetings with feature creep on the horizon.

Of course being a good project manager, I am managing that fine; but that also means that I have a lot of extra work to do. Add to the fact that my resource allowance has shrunk, and that the deadline has been moved up two weeks in order to facilitate equipment setup at the conference, and that means crunch time this and next week.

That 80% time is pretty nice, now that I think about it.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: @work, IBM