My work office has a full kitchen that nobody ever uses, so one day I decided to just make cookies for everyone while I was on the clock. As I suspected, nobody wants to be the one to reprimand the guy giving out cookies for wasting company time. I work mostly remote now, but once a month when I come in for a meeting I’ll spend a couple hours in the morning making cookies, and everyone’s always excited for it.

You’d be surprised what you can get away with by just doing stuff without asking if it’s okay first. Asking first usually gets ideas shot down, but once you’re already in the middle of doing something, most people assume someone gave the go-ahead. Worst case scenario you can pull the “I thought it’d be fine” line, but I almost never have to do that.