We have a form of it called fix-it-friday and I find it helps a lot with minor UX improvements and tech debt that would otherwise fall in-between the cracks.
You're probably downvoted because it's semi-off-topic, but I think it's close enough to be relevant and worth discussing.
Where I work, we dedicate 1 day per sprint to tech debt where everyone can just work on fixing whatever they want. It's made HUGE differences to the developer experience. So many of the things that slow us down and annoy us have gotten fixed this way. Sounds about the same as your fix-it-fridays.
This is not 20% time for personal projects. This is is scrambling after the fact to fix things that should be done as part of the normal development cycle. Formalizing it is basically saying "we know our process sucks, but instead of fixing it, we're going to sell it as a feature."
Fridays can be "lame duck" days, and I never start something new over after noon. So Fix it Friday is a good way to allocate smaller blocks of time for smaller tasks.
But 20% is about side projects. Meeting Free Monday could be a good policy to foster those.
Yeah, my manager love his job and works 12-14 hours a day. I have to push back often on Friday to say "I'm out", he's always cool with it but he tends to forget what day it is so I have to remind him. It's on reason I stick with the well paid consultant by the hour work. I like programming but it's not my sole reason for existence. The only reason I still like it is that I survived a burn out job and realized that I didn't hate programming, I just hated not having a life because I was working such long hours and had no energy for other things.
Yup. Some people choose to just do regular feature work, others use it to great effect. Some of the best examples are slowdowns that sort of fall in-between feature teams, or debugging features that help other devs/QA, or tooling that helps debug customer issues. I imagine most of the things fixed come from annoyances that devs run into that they want to improve the product, QA, or tooling experience, customer experience.
