Since the Last Progress Report, I Have Worked on This Progress Report

This always takes much longer than it ought to, in large part because it’s hard to remember exactly when certain significant things happened, which leads to a lot of searching of my email trying to determine when various things saw print, and which of the available categories it fits in. I probably really ought to keep a running tally of my activities as the year goes along, but they tweak the form every year or two, so my attempts have always been thwarted– I end up spending a bunch of time working out how to convert from one version of the form to another.

I have to do monthly reports, and then I can choose my greatest hits from them for the annual report. At one point long ago the reports were weekly, but that got to heavily into minutia, which wasn’t particularly useful. There’s only so much you can report about aligning optics and tweaking lasers, and sometime no real progress is made at all, especially if you’ve stepped in some management and can’t spend time in the lab. All too often the reports go along the lines of

Week N: Discovered some anomaly.

Week N+1 Investigated anomaly; finally identified and solved the problem

Week N+2 Oops, no I didn’t.

When you finally do fix the issue, what you’ve reported is all of the path-dependent work you did, instead of the actual progress you made.