My current project is aimed at the mostly unsolved problem of controller reduction. I started the project six months ago. At least three of those months were spent doing other crap (taking a class, TAing, peer reviewing a few papers, revising a paper accepted to a conference, preparing said talk...). During the three months I had to work, I implemented balanced truncation for model reduction on linear systems, adapted spacetime optimization to work with Galerkin projections, ported a fast forward dynamics engine over to our system, read a bunch of papers, and spent countless hours debugging and tuning nonlinear constrained optimization solvers. But I haven't gotten any compelling results yet, and my advisor thinks it's because I'm not passionate about the problem. My counter is that I cannot be passionate about the problem if I'm feeling threatened to get results.
The new project involves using adjoint methods to solve spacetime problems faster, and it may be useful in the project that I have been working on.
What a tremendous contribution to humanity. The world is, officially, a better place.