Great excerpt from an article about ex-Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer:

“It’s funny,” she said. “People have been asking me since I got here, ‘When is Yahoo going to have 20% time?’”

“I’ve got to tell you the dirty little secret of Google’s 20% time. It’s really 120% time.”

She said that 20% time projects aren’t projects you can do instead of doing your regular job for a whole day every week. It’s “stuff that you’ve got to do beyond your regular job.”

It was drilled into me early on that no single project or client is, by itself, enough to teach me everything needed for the next level. So you need to seek out a second thing. “120% time” is ingrained in my work psyche and has served me well.