So I'm working on timesheets. That is what I've come to. But doing them during work hours is new, especially since I don't know how to book my timesheet filling time.
This sort of thing came up in a meeting this morning.
The NIH will pay you to do research, but they will not pay you to write the grants necessary to get them to pay you to do research.
That's ok if you are in a traditional university. Usually grants only pay the 30% of your salary over the summer. NIH assumes that you write the grants during the school year. But if you are in a medical school or research institute you need to cover all of your salary with grants, and to do that you need to spend most of your time writing grants. Which you can't get paid to do. Because that is not what NIH is paying you to do.
Catch 22.
So the solution is for the med school to pay, say, 2% of the researcher's salary, and for everyone to pretend that the researcher is spending that fifty minutes per week writing eight or ten grants a year. When in fact, they are spending 50 hours a week working on grants. There is an agreement from both sides just not to talk about it. Because the whole system would fall apart if you talked about it.