Your KM management, how do you allocate time?

In the organization I work - IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre - the drive is towards every increasing pressure to justify every 30 minutes of work and write time on approved projects (either internally or externally financed). We do NOT have discretionary time for KM in the broad sense of the word, so including time for creativity, learning, sharing, general documenting.

This leads to the situation that less self-confident or less caring colleagues do little explicit KM outside funded projects and/or have to spend private time on this.

This has not always been the case. Up to about 8 years ago we had 'slack' time, curiously enough labelled TSNP = Time Spent Non Productive !! However curious the label, it nevertheless encouraged knowledge workers in the organization to use something in the order of 3 - 4 hours a week for general KM in the broad way of the word as outlined above.

Discussion: how do you that as knowledge worker. What do you allow yourself in terms of non project specific KM time in case you are a independant worker and how much time do you fight for in your organization if employed? Or last, how much time do you spend on KM in your own private (non paid) time?

If the response to this topic is good, if it turns out to concern people, I may follow up with a more statistically relevant monkeysurvey .

Peter J. Bury