[alacombe]

> It's not intended to just be using 20% of your work time to work on whatever the heck you want to.

Yes it is, I quote:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20%25_Project

The 20% Project is an initiative where company employees are allocated twenty-percent of their paid work time to pursue personal projects. The objective of the program is to inspire innovation in participating employees and ultimately increase company potential. The 20% Project was influenced by a comparable program, launched in 1948, by manufacturing multinational 3M which required employees to dedicate fifteen-percent of their paid hours to a personal interest.[1]

Nothing say anything about company related projects, it only mentions personal projects. If you're talking about company projects, then it's not a 20% project. Even less so if you are talking about doing 100% of your company work beside.

I've got a feeling SV companies have hijacked the term 1) for PR bs, and 2) to get more work from employees.

[lupire]

You are misunderstanding what "personal" means here.

It means personal preference for work, not personal activities.

If it just meant "34 he work weeks" they would have called it that.

Does "inventing the post-it note" sounds like a personal non-3M-business-related project?

https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/careers-us/working-at-3m/life-wi...

https://www.fastcompany.com/1663137/how-3m-gave-everyone-day...

[alacombe]

> You are misunderstanding what "personal" means here.

[citation needed]

Otherwise, a "personal project" is a project I own.

[jlokier]

It looks to me like the Wikipedia text is misleading, because I agree with your interpretation of the text.

Somebody should update Wikipedia...

I think that originates with Google's PR, because I remember the PR when the 20% initiative was introduced was misleading at the time too. To outsiders, I remember (~20 years ago) the PR gave the impression you could work on anything of personal interest, such as running or contributing to open source projects, your own programming language or editor or whatever for 20% of the week if you joined Google. Google would own what you did there so they would benefit (much like the 3M post-it notes thing), but other than that it was like paid personal-development and mind-refreshment time. But it's not like that and probably never was.