Wow - Atlassian, have just announced that are going to allow staff to work on pet projects for 20% of the working week. This is awesome and I await to see what gets produced at the end of the 6 month trial period. Atlassian is still trying to figure out how/when this 20% can be used? I have a radical idea! Why not follow on from 37signals, where a 4 day week has just been introduced. 20% of time = 1 day a week. So pick a day and let all engineers do their own thing on that day. It should at least take care of scheduling conflicts.