<story><title>Leave Work Unassigned and See Who Steps Forward</title><url>https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/leave-work-unassigned-and-see-who-steps-forward</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>codeonfire</author><text>Ugg.  I&amp;#x27;m sorry about being negative but here are some protips:&lt;p&gt;1. If a manager leaves work unassigned and you pick it up, prepare to have a LOT more work dumped on you in the future for no reward.&lt;p&gt;2. If you pretend to be a manager with hopes of being made a manager, all that you will accomplish is you are going to end up doing your job AND your bosses job.  Your boss will look like a hero to his&amp;#x2F;her peers.  You&amp;#x27;ll kill yourself and won&amp;#x27;t be made a manager regardless.&lt;p&gt;A better approach is to be smart about it.  Always negotiate the work and what you&amp;#x27;re going to get out of it ahead of time.  Maybe you just get some political capital, praise, or a positive review.  Don&amp;#x27;t just blindly do work you weren&amp;#x27;t asked to do thinking it will be rewarded.</text></comment>
<story><title>Leave Work Unassigned and See Who Steps Forward</title><url>https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/leave-work-unassigned-and-see-who-steps-forward</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>d23</author><text>&amp;gt; Companies don&amp;#x27;t need to go so far as the well-known Google 20 percent time&lt;p&gt;A bit of a digression here.&lt;p&gt;I love that people think the idea that letting employees spend a measly 20% of their time deciding what they should be working on is somehow an extreme idea.  What portion of your typical day would you honestly say is devoted to solid, in-the-flow work?  After all the meeting, context switches, random interruptions, lunch, distractions on company chat -- I personally would say a fraction.  Or flow state is simply dead for me at the office.&lt;p&gt;Recently, my roommate and I came home after work and ended up knocking out a very useful skunkworks project in about 6 hours over the course of 2 nights.  That completely uninterrupted time mixed with the fact that it was a project that was freshly conceived and still full of passion in our minds let us get more work done in that burst than we felt like we had in weeks.&lt;p&gt;20% time is a joke.  We need to ditch this 40 hour, strictly scheduled workweek in distracting office environments and try some radically different ways of getting productivity boosts.  It just so happens that people also feel a lot better when they get these boosts to boot.  I know after knocking out that project certainly made me feel awesome.</text></comment>