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.
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.
Downing Customer Service for a week is not much fun for anybody, but it's doable. You just need to manage the expectations for your users and make sure your product is so self-explanatory that it really doesn't need much customer service in the first place.
I can do a week's worth of handholding for all the services I run in about 2 hours. Normally I do it during the week as needed, but occasionally I'll troop off into the sticks for up to a week at a time. Thus far I've managed to pull it off without the business collapsing.
It parses if you are a Brit. The phrase 'down tools' harks back to the years of industrial strife when the union would instruct workers to ... well, I'm sure you can guess.
My thought on this initiative was that it reminded me of the Google system of personal projects, expect coordinated across the entire company.
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.
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!
