In years past, Google was renowned for its 20% time – a developer was allowed to allocate one day a week to working on ideas that weren’t necessarily related to their normal Googley projects. Some of these ideas were even spun off into new properties for Google, and some were incorporated into existing internal and public-facing projects.

The idea of freeing employees up to do something which inspires them is clearly enticing; in fact there’s been lots of research which indicates that a four day work-week is as productive – if not more productive – than a five day week.

At Go Tripod, we’re constantly thinking about how to mix up our business, how to keep things fresh, and how to improve the way we work. At the same time we’re a consultancy, so allocating a full day a week to something like this a bit impractical being a fairly small company.

What to do?

Once A Month

Let’s compromise: Go Tripod will be taking one day a month out to work on internal projects, marketing, new ideas and exciting bits and bobs. During these days we’ll only be answering support tickets. Imagine it as a staff training day, or an inset day at a British school, where the employees spend some time to take stock, plan ahead, and come up with improvements.

Internal Projects

We use tools like Basecamp, Slack and Freshbooks to manage projects, to communicate, and to invoice. Some of these don’t always work as smoothly as we like, and so to improve the service we can give to our clients, we build internal tools to improve our workflow. On the GTBDD (catchy!), we’ll be seeing if there’s anything we can do to further these tools or if there are new ones we can build.

Products

Every consultancy would love to have some SAAS to bring in recurring revenue. We’ll be examining the industries we know best and hitting the whiteboard to see if there are any tasty opportunities for us to launch a new product in 2016.

Learning

In the past year we’ve been working with React and React Native, both of which have given us important tools to improve the quality, and reduce the cost, of our work. This year, we’ll continue to look at the latest technologies and strengthen our knowledge of our existing box of tricks, and the GTBDD will give us more of an opportunity to do so.

Fun & Games

On top of these virtuous goals, we’ll also be doing some stuff to blow off steam as a team. Whether that’s researching some JavaScript games framework, playing with a few Raspberry Pis, or just taking time out in Cornwall to do something a bit more outdoorsy – we’ll have one day a month to do it.

Happy New Year

We hope that this is an experiment that will help both Go Tripod and our clients. We’ve structured it in such a way that it will cause minimal disruption to our business but we’re doing it often enough for it to be of real benefit to us. Here’s to an exciting 2016!