[mondoshawan]

At the time she made this statement, she represented Yahoo, not Google, and was making major changes in its culture to fit her direction. I wouldn't put much stock into these statements.

As a current Googler, I've been spending 20% of my time on self-directed work, and 80% on what is assigned since I started, and my contributions have been to both open/released software and also internal stuff, and I joined in 2006.

[lallysingh]

As an ex-googler, my manager said that we should bank our time and then spend a week on our 20 to make good progress.

[mondoshawan]

That's what I did so much in my early days at Google, banking a week's worth of time and making a huge push. I don't do that too much anymore, though.