I make an effort not to indulge the urge to optimize for impressiveness,
Interesting point. I don't have much trouble getting things done and my goals are mostly not of the impressive kind. I only recently learned to optimize impressiveness as a tool for 'winning at life'. Reconsidering this and rereading Kays post I notice that I do aim for impressiveness (or at least visibility) of my work to some degree.
I wonder whether the impressiveness optimization desire can be hacked to work for actual goals. I'd think that impressiveness measured by actual effort seems to do the trick. The hard part being of course the measuring outcome. If our scientitic system already fails at that it presumably is a hard problem.
Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to comment on this thread explaining the most awesome thing you've done this month. You may be as blatantly proud of yourself as you feel. You may unabashedly consider yourself the coolest freaking person ever because of that awesome thing you're dying to tell everyone about. This is the place to do just that.
Remember, however, that this isn't any kind of progress thread. Nor is it any kind of proposal thread. This thread is solely for people to talk about the awesome things they have done. Not "will do". Not "are working on". Have already done. This is to cultivate an environment of object level productivity rather than meta-productivity methods.
So, what's the coolest thing you've done this month?