It may help to document ideas and pitfalls as you think of them. If you're trying out things in code, leave that work on your own branches, and link from the doc. It gives managers a tangible artifact to see you're making progress. It's also valuable documentation for others after the task is done. Extra plus: come performance review time, you have a paper trail of everything you've done, everything you tried that didn't work out, everything you can take credit for.