> your management chain is going to decide you aren't picking up enough work in sprint planning
A trivial workaround: "hey team, a month ago I did some research on X, and maybe this is something that could be valuable for us to try". It's mathematically the same, but shhh.
You don't need to lie. It's actually better to reflect for some days on any new research.
It's been done. In one of his books Feynman describes how the scientists on the Manhattan project would "estimate" their results as what they had accomplished in the prior quarter. It's a bit messy to get it started, but once you've got a cadence you can always maintain that three months of buffer.
Edit: Now I'm thinking about what kind of tooling I'd want to make the process seamless.
I've had a researcher describe to me how a lot of times they have to submit a grant proposal for what they're already doing, funded by a previous grant. If approved, it will actually be used for the next chunk of research...
(I don't recall why, exactly. Something about how there's a chicken and egg problem, where they wouldn't have enough results to support the grant proposal if they hadn't already been doing the research...)
It had been done in sentence as quoted from the post as well ("hey, I did some research on X"). GGP suggested waiting for some time purely for psychological purposes. But yeah, I don't think it matters a lot after a while either.
If the management doesn't like it, they'll figure it out that if you keep coming up with these then you must be spending time on them - continuously. :)
A trivial workaround: "hey team, a month ago I did some research on X, and maybe this is something that could be valuable for us to try". It's mathematically the same, but shhh.
You don't need to lie. It's actually better to reflect for some days on any new research.