For what it's worth, I had a friend who worked at Google a few years ago and asked her about her 20% time. I was extremely underwhelmed, as it sounded like the exact same project she was working on from day to day. My idea of 20% time was always this really creative unbounded time to pursue ideas and things that are interesting to you, but for her it really just sounded like a logical extension of what she was already doing. It was just weird, given all of the projects in all of Google, with all sorts of interests, why would she just focus on the things she was already doing?
If that was where 20% time was going, I don't think we're missing much.
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