It's this wonderful time of the year when I and probably a lot of other researchers are swamped with paperwork, preparing yearly reports, grant applications etc. And it's ridiculous. Pretty much every friggin institution, whether you're submitting a report to the faculty, explaining what you've been doing to a grant agency, applying for a new research grant, trying to get money for a conference or whatnot requires you to include your CV in a format/online form of their choice. Now, I've counted how many times I had to do something like that over the last calendar year, and as far as I remember, it's 26. Each time it took me around 90 minutes to copy and format the data according to some bureaucrat's wishes, so together the procedure stole around 2340 minutes, that is, 39 hours of my time. This is pretty much a whole working week a year spent on re-formatting my CV!! To give you a bigger picture, consider the following examples: The British A