If the manager isn't satisfied with receiving a "hmmmm, I can't think of anything in particular at this time off the top of my head" for most of these questions 80% of the time, then these questions require a level of introspection that would necessitate setting aside 30-60 minutes of pre-work for the meeting to do introspection and brainstorming, or what most likely happens is the report just makes up some bullshit on the fly that they think their manager wants to hear to "what motivated you this past month at work?" or "what are some ideas you have now that you’d like us to try implementing in our team?".

For those of us who are spending all of our cognitive horsepower just to keep rowing the boat forward and meeting expectations and don't have spare hours to just wander and contemplate lief and work and motivation and improvements to process or the team, this seems like a recipe for receiving random bullshit answers.

UNLESS - the manager were to schedule time for that pre-work, like setting 30 min on the cal for separately brainstorming answers and then 30 min immediately after discussing anything that came up. Which I _do_ think would be awesome.

But just saying "hey here's a google doc, any time you have a thought pop up during the next couple weeks jot it down" won't even work. You need to schedule and prioritize it agains the other tasks you are asking the report to work on.