I try to make a habit of posting my grant proposals here after the application period has passed, both because I hope people might find them to be useful models, and because doing so is a good opportunity for a brief postmortem.
If you’d like to take a look at my proposal for the NSERC Discovery grant, you can do so here. The proposal was funded, so hopefully it is a reasonably good model.
The NSERC format has the benefit that it is somewhat brief, so writing the proposal is reasonably low-effort; this has the side-effect, unfortunately, that the proposals cannot be very detailed (or readable).
On reading the proposal, I am a bit struck at how quickly many of the projects therein were completed; many of them are already done and on the arXiv! Of course a few of the more ambitious projects mentioned are still far from complete. On the other hand, it’s interesting to see how some of my current interests have already diverged a bit from the proposal — for example, I’m now thinking quite a bit about the p-curvature conjecture, but the approach I have in mind is somewhat different than what I had proposed at the time.
And I think my output in the last year or so has (maybe unusually and perhaps immodestly) been quite a bit more interesting than what was proposed. In particular this paper proves something I’d wanted to prove since I was a postdoc, and there’s very little hint of it in the proposal.