Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead

My previous employer had a 10% time in place - which while in theory was a great idea, I found myself always too busy to take advantage of the time. This is in no fault to my employer, or my direct management - but lets face it - at a startup, there is little room to not be working. When you already are coding long hours, trying to make quick changes, implementing new features constantly - there just isn't enough time to do it.

I disagree. I currently work at a startup with 10% time, and barring rare "the servers are on fire!" events, we're pretty religious about doing it. Even when we skip it, it's credited so we can take it later (arguably better since you get longer stretches of it).

Like most startups, we also operate at breakneck pace, we're not exactly sitting around twiddling our thumbs. This strikes me as the same as "I don't have time to..." excuses people make in their personal lives. If you value it enough, you will find a place for it.

It's all about how much you actually value the 10%-time, or if it's just a recruiting/PR gimmick. If the company approaches it from a "it would be nice if..." angle, it will always find a million things that are higher-priority than 10%-time. If you approach it from the "this is a critical part of company strategy" angle, you will find ways to keep it sacrosanct.

I was often encouraged to just take the 10% time - and perhaps it is an excuse on my part, but at the same time I valued my work and took pride in accomplishing certain tasks that I felt that that work was far more important. In the end, I did spend some time on personal projects that ended up getting implemented, but in the year and a half I was there, it was definitely not an often used perk (on my part).