

What will happen when a software company downs tools for a week? - bensummers
http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2010/02/what-will-happen-when-a-software-company-downs-tools-for-a-week.html

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robinwarren
We do something similar around each major release, we call it Branching Day as
it's when we create the maintenance branch in cvs. We branch on the thursday
and each developer is free to try something new out to kick off development on
the next version until friday afternoon. If there's much worth showing we get
the company together for some beers and demonstrate what we've come up with.
It's normally backendy or code tidying kind of stuff which might not otherwise
might not get pushed up the priorities or some visual nicety we know people
will like but again are unlikely to ever shout for.

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jasonkester
I personally do this all the time. I actually keep several major projects
going at all times just so that I can benefit from the creativity boost that
comes from switching onto a new task with a fresh outlook.

Better still, I find, is to travel. This last week, for example, I spent
hopping fishing boats between villages on the pacific coast of Colombia, well
out of Wifi range, phones, and power.

Having a grand total of 8 hours laptop charge to eke out from the hammock over
that week really focused the time I had. And I came back to 2 days of
ridiculous productivity as all the pent-up ideas flowed out into the IDE.

Sure, you have to deal with 100 customer emails when you get back, but overall
I consider it a big productivity win.

(and you get to go surfing in Colombia!)

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fbailey
cool, but after the title I had the horrible thought that this was about an
SaaS Company powering down for a week...

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tdoggette
Yeah, the headline doesn't parse. The verb is "downs," it seems, but they're
not taking anything down.

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thalur
They haven't _taken_ anything down, they've _put_ down their tools.

<http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/throw_down_one%27s_tools>

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pbhjpbhj
Except that they haven't. They've just been told to work on other things for
3½ days.

I like the idea though.

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megamark16
That's exactly what confused me, they aren't putting down tools, they're just
using them for whatever they want.

I really like the idea too, at my last job there was a lot of discussion for a
while about taking 4 hours each week to work on whatever you wanted and
present it to the group at the next team meeting. It never really panned out,
at least not officially.

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mcantor
This sounds similar to the "Hack Day" conceived over at Yahoo!. We shamelessly
stole the idea here at AG: once a year every single developer & business
analyst takes 24 hours to gather into loosely planned teams with even more
loosely planned ideas and see what kind of cool stuff we can build. Prizes are
awarded for Overall Best Hack, Funniest Hack, Best Internal Hack, Most Likely
to Go Over Budget, etc., and in fact, several projects who saw their inception
as throwaway Hack Day ideas have charmed the company brass and become fully-
implemented, revenue-generating projects in their own right. Very exciting!

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pg
Twitter originated this way, I believe.

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sayrer
yeah, they said so at startup school: <http://bit.ly/bUfWf>

