The idea of 10% time is letting your employees spend 10% of their hours (or one day a quarter – whatever) working on any project they want. The idea is to spur innovation.
Now, this doesn’t naturally appear to apply to writers. I mean, we’re on 10% Time ALL THE TIME, right? Well… not really. In a global sense, yes. We have huge amounts of autonomy in picking our goals, but once we do, there are schedules to be met just like any other project that you actually want to complete.
But I like this idea. I want to adopt it for a pet. Or make love to it. Or have little baby ideas with it. Something.
So it got me thinking… I kind of do this already. Every once in a while, I run off to “think big thoughts.” Or just have a mini-retreat at the Starbucks where I freewrite about nothing and anything. Normally, I thought of those as creativity stirrers, mucking up the sludge in the basement of my mind. But maybe I should be setting time aside, even a few hours once a month, to think Globally about my writing and my career. What Big Problems are there and how would I solve them.
A note I put in the margin of DRIVE: “I want to grow a business I treasure.” I’m not even sure what that means – I think I could spend a couple hours just unpacking that idea. But that’s the kind of thing I think could spur innovation in my business. Not just coming up with a new series or how to better sell ebooks, but how to build a “business I treasure.”
TL;DR Read the book http://smarturl.it/DRIVEDanPink
Also: watch the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y