We use variants of agile at work. Daily stand-ups, email notes, two-week iterations. My daily standups look a lot like the grandparent, except they're at 4:00 PM instead of 9:30 AM and last only about 10 minutes.
But everyone recognizes that the process is there to guide us and not to constrain us. If your report is "I did nothing for the project today", well, that's your report. I had one feature where my report for every single one of the first 4 days was "I tried this and it didn't work." Followed by 2 weeks of furious coding where I didn't check anything in, followed by dumping 2500 lines on my code reviewer. I didn't get any grief from my coworkers (got lots of encouragement, actually), because they recognized that it was a hard problem, there were a lot of constraints, and we didn't even know what the constraints were until could put something up on the screen and start testing it.