I have always been a big proponent of companies allowing employees time to work on new and innovative things that they don’t get to work on everyday. In fact I have been brainstorming on how to allow my staff time to play with new technologies, techniques and ideas on a regular basis without causing our schedules to slip. A great example of this right is the internal Yahoo event called Hack Days.

On these days Yahoo employees are allowed to drop everything they are doing and work on something cool, new and unique for 24-hours. The result? Well I don’t have any numberss but I would bet that a lot of the cool stuff we see from Yahoo is the result of a hack day. In case you have been under a rock Yahoo is not a small company, so this type of event represents a major investment in innovation. I believe it is worth every penny paid if for only one reason - employee moral. Giving people the opportunity to take a short break for the daily grind can be a good thing for creativity by preventing burnout and preserving employee sanity.

This month on September 29th and 30th Yahoo is opening their hack day to the public. The 29th is a workshop day where you can get tips, tutorials and training from the Yahoo User Interface(YUI) team, programmers and the Flickr, Del.icio.us, Mail, Messenger, search and map teams. Wow! The really cool part is on the 30th. Get your ideas together, create your own team and get to creating. The best part is that this is a rare opportunity to create a hack and get help from the people who wrote the application. Sounds a lot like Barcamp and Rails Day all mashed up. Not sure if this is a Sunnyvale only event. Will find out more on that. In the mean time you can get more information at HackDay.org.