I've procrastinated working on my thesis for more than a year | Hacker News Reader

I've procrastinated working on my thesis for more than a year

thoughtsbyaashiq.bearblog.dev

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If you're not just making slow progress but literally unable to make a single bit of progress, my goto strategy is similar to what writers call a vomit draft.

For writing it conventionally means means writing words without stopping to plan or edit, no corrections allowed, the rule is you just have to keep typing, no matter what. It's about something being better than nothing, creating momentum, and also avoids being too critical because you literally can not stop and make edits to old work.

Remember the only rule is keep typing. Even if it means typing random nonsense for awhile.

I do all that but I sometimes make it even more extreme. I make it the goal to produce truly terrible version of the the thing I'm trying to make. Full of cliches and tropes in writing. Amateur coding mistakes if it's a technical project. Not just bad but legit so awful that I would truly embarrassed if somebody else saw it. Like literally, what would so shoddy I'd be afraid to have someone look at my screen right now. I mean literally ask yourself what work is so bad you would be humiliated if your advisor saw it. Make that your goal.

But it still works. After you have something even it's an abomination, it gets your brain thinking about it and working on it, and it's so much easier to make the obvious improvements, and then more, and eventually you are just doing things normally.

DO THIS. I have a friend that was doing a PhD and procrastinated and they kick him out after the ten year time limit. True they gave him an MA for his work, but still that was ten years of his life wasted stressing out about procrastinating about not doing his PhD, that could have been spent at the beach with a martini and a girl in a bikini.

Wait, that's the alternative to doing a PhD??

where do I signup

The most common academic titles are:

Bachelors - Masters - Licentiat - Doctor

A Lic. is not use din the US, but very common in Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licentiate_(degree)

And is basically what you can take out after half a Ph.D. program. In many technical schools in Sweden you are expected to do Lic. on the way to Ph.D. or if you burn out you at least have a Lic.

I think GP is asking about the M&B, not the MA.

Licentiates certainly aren't commonly used in the States, but there are several programs that offer ecclesial licentiates like Licentiate of Sacred Theology or Licentiate of Canon Law, which are each required for work in certain areas even in the States.

In 30 years of academia in Canada -- I've never heard of this requirement....

Beaches...bikinis...martinis.

Heh, I met a chap doing a PhD in maths at a decent university in Northern England (no names), he was in his 8th year: He was funded for the first 3 years, managed to get another year of funding when that ended and subsequently lived off his parents. By year 6 they were a bit sick of this and stopped, so he had no money for rent so started to live in the department, working until late in the evening and then sleeping in a cupboard. He'd been doing that for 2 years when I met him. Perhaps he's still there ...

> that could have been spent at the beach

As a procrastinator myself, this is actually a self-poisoning attitude that I've worked on removing, in the spirit of being kind to myself. (Procrastination tends to get worse when you have self-hate spirals.)

It's so easy to look back on wasted hours and think "I could have been doing anything better than that." I use to have days at work where I didn't accomplish much, and say to myself "I'm a horrible father because I could have spent today with my kids."

It's true that procrastination eats away hours of our lives, but there's no reality where most of us would have been able to say "I know I'll procrastinate the next three days, I'll take a beach vacation with those hours instead, and then do the job promptly the next day."

This kind of (common) thinking is no better than any other kinds of regrets in life, staying awake and thinking "what if I had asked that person out in high school?" etc etc.

But YOUR thinking is a self poisoning attitude (jesting a little with you btw :), because it creates a sense of complacency. If we regret those moments -- and we should -- we will be all the more vigilant not to waste them in the future.

Regrets are THE most useful lessons our brain can give us. If I HAD asked the person out in hughschool maybe I'd be happy now and rich. Or whatever. Next time you meet a hot chick that you love -- you won't make the same mistake twice. Ask her out!

I think it's Cunningham's law at play.

Correcting something is much easier than coming up with it.

Reminds me : If you want an answer to a question on the internet, make an incorrect statement.

Yes, that's Cunningham's law. I generalized it because I genuinely believe it still holds, and applies nicely here. Sorry if my comment above was confusing.

So publish your vomit draft on the internet to have it improved for you?

Tangentially, this is where I see a ton of potential in these new ML tools like ChatGPT. If you're expecting it to produce finished work, you'll often be disappointed, but if it can even produce a bad version of what you need, the time saved could be enormous.

This might be dangerous advice, but consider interactively using a language model in writing "vomit draft". I tried copilot recently, and even though some of what it suggests is "no, no, NO!"-material, it really helps. I hadn't known how much simple writing block - struggling to write the easy parts - kept me back.

First time I heard about this. And I think I really really like it.

I have a huge writers block for anything I'm good or within my specialized field, it's kind of strange. Especially for scientific work this is extra bad, not being able to write, no matter how much time I dedicate to it.

I'll take this approach to heart next time, thanks. I think this is right up my alley, including the funny name for it.

> I do all that but I sometimes make it even more extreme. I make it the goal to produce truly terrible version of the the thing I'm trying to make.

You know, I've read and heard all sorts of advice on writing, and this is the first time I've seen this, and I think it's brilliant. Undergrad me absolutely should have done this, 'cause the perfectionism I grew up with took a long time to unlearn.

Do you have an opinion on getting drunk during the process to lower inhibition? Not a thing I've ever tried, but I've definitely heard of people doing it.

ADHD happens to correlate with a higher rate of addiction, substance abuse.

I would not recommend getting drunk as a tool for getting things done. The problem is it might work. And if it does, you don't want to make a habit of reaching for that tool whenever you find yourself procrastinating. That way lies aforementioned statistics.

This is genius. Anecdotally I’ve seen a high correlation between procrastination and perfectionism. Once you have a vomit draft I can see how the perfectionist bent suddenly works in your favour.

I agree 100%.

When coding I have a rule: "first make it work, then make it pretty".

The MVP can be a complete spaghetti piece of crap, just make it work. When it works, you can iterate on making it elegant.

Oh, and if you work for a Corporation, don't tell them it's done when the crappy MVP finally works. You're still "working on it" if they ask.

Otherwise the spaghetti crap will end up in production.

  1. Make it work
  2. Make it right
  3. Make it performant (if too slow).

I disagree.

1. Make it work 2. Make it performant (always, but within reason) 3. Clean up your mess to prevent future mistakes

I claim that "if too slow" can't be judged because you almost never have the slowest possible target device.

I disagree with all of you.

Make it work. Then make it maintainable. Then polish it to make it more ideal.

When it works it can be spaghetti and lack testing and filled with hacks. After you make it maintainable it can still be less than ideal — some hacks here and there in leaf functions but things are localized and understandable and non-brittle (ie good testing coverage, design which has appropriate abstraction, refactors to promote test ability, no more spaghetti etc etc). Then in the final step you polish the stuff to gold (ie use better solutions or improve performance). It is the only way.

  1. Make it work
  2. Make it understandable
  3. Make it performant (if too slow).

Except I've seen too many spaghetti code craps in production to actually recommend this. There is a plethora of reasons why colleagues (or even you) will end up not waiting until code is production ready (e.g.: A new nice task comes in which you'd rather work on, you get reassigned, you get sick and someone else has to finish, you get a great opportunity to show off and say "hey I'm already done no problem", a tester sees and tests the features and misinforms the customer, etc. etc.) I am not saying your code needs to be perfect and then you only notice the one great flaw which requires re-engineering after weeks of hard work. I am saying find a good (backed by TDD) middle ground of fast work and fitting into existing / designing a decent architecture.

My 2 cents only, and if you can make it work that's great. But I will never go ahead and recommend this to juniors or even younger seniors.

As someone who otherwise works somewhat similar to OPs workflow, I have to agree. One golden rule for me: The "vomit draft" version cannot be your MVP. It is never Viable for production.

That said, TDD (with emphasis on driven) is no silver bullet either, especially when working that way - the tests are equally affected and I've seen enouph code bases where the initial test surface was so off compared to what was needed/sensible that it ended up being solely a hindrance and stifling to actual rework/refactor - with people ending up throwing it away and rewriting the tests from scratch, or worst case, simply setting them to be ignored on build.

My variation on this. Make it work then make it slightly less horrible.

Then repeat until you are proud of the work.

My teammate says he does this. Writes everything three times, and is careful not to let _anyone_ see the first two, lest somebody tell him it's "good enough."

> Oh, and if you work for a Corporation, don't tell them it's done when the crappy MVP finally works. You're still "working on it" if they ask.

I would if I could, but schedules are schedules and stuff has to ship...

I'd go a bit further, it's more like we lack an evaluation compass therefore we can't even try because we don't know if we will be able to see a difference. You can't anticipate benefits of any path and most of the time it's anticipation that drives your effort (you "foresee" things). Dealing with that situation requires changing this habit and go wander, try to find anything that revives curiosity, gives you a clue, a perspective you didn't have.

That's great advice. I do something similar with art. I draw 100 poor sketches/drawings that are meant to be really bad and then eventually the good idea pops out without trying.

I think this has something to do with avoiding triggering your amygdala, because once the stress sets in you get a fight or flight reaction and then creativity gets completely shut down. Dance around the amygdala and you'll be creating cool stuff.

I do something similar. There even used to be a lovely website that had a text entry box which would delete words if you didn’t keep up a certain words per minute. It sounds daft but it was actually useful to use at least a couple of times to train yourself to keep writing, even if it was garbage. I think now I might be tempted to use dictation to reduce barriers ti getting words down even more.

Sounds like The Most Dangerous Writing App! https://www.wired.com/2016/03/sadistic-writing-app-deletes-w...

direct link : https://www.squibler.io/dangerous-writing-prompt-app

This works well for writing. Writing, though, comes at a later stage after you've done at least some of the actual work (code, experiments, whatever). It's the work that people have most trouble with. The ideal trajectory is something like MVP -> write -> iterate. People usually get stuck in the MVP phase.

I don't have a good solution to this, except that at least from personal experience, prolonged procrastination is an indication that you don't like the work. And this can be difficult to acknowledge because maybe you liked it earlier, or thought that you did. And then ego becomes involved. Knowing what you like and don't like can also be quite tricky. Sometimes, the only real solution is to quit and do something else.

Yeah. I'm not a particular vomit draft or mindmap or whatever proponent for writing. But the original post seems to be more about actually doing the lab work for the thesis that's a prerequisite to writing something.

That was where I was with my undergrad thesis. There were dependencies on other work in the lab which wasn't progressing quickly and I just had a lot of trouble getting to the point where I had something to write about. The writing wasn't the big deal.

The equivalent of this today is getting high and using GPT3. I don’t think there is a name for it—yet.

"Get high and unleash the AI"

I was thinking something like “the cyberbong draft”

You know, I'm fairly sure that there is more than just procrastination at play. This feels like some human mal-adaptation where we do anything (or nothing) to avoid dealing with That One Terrible Thing, whatever it may be.

Throughout my career I've had this feeling or state of thinking multiple times, whether I had to work with legacy code, uncooperative individuals, or just a week ago, work with a bad DB schema and write complex queries against it.

In my case, procrastination was just a consequence of wanting to do something but I very clearly also remember just sitting and staring at the task at hand, doing absolutely nothing, because I couldn't stomach how bad everything about the task that needed to be done was - bunches of redundant tables, illogical linking of data, lots of overcomplication, no documentation and no examples of helpful queries whatsoever.

> If you're not just making slow progress but literally unable to make a single bit of progress, my goto strategy is similar to what writers call a vomit draft.

In the end, just forcing myself to get started, writing out the dozen of different things I needed as a part of the query and then working backwards through everything, was what worked. It took hours of uninterrupted work, I felt miserable throughout it, but I got things done in the end, all because of that decision to actually work on it and deal with the pain and suffering, very much how someone would need to make the leap to dive into legacy code, or an issue for a project that doesn't have monitoring or instrumentation, or writing a thesis.

I think that's why techniques like Pomodoro also get recommended, because if you trick yourself into saying that you'll only do a bit of suffering (work on the horrible thing) now and will take a break later, it's more tolerable: https://todoist.com/productivity-methods/pomodoro-technique

I'm just writing this because to me it feels different from how people commonly view procrastination: just getting distracted and wanting dopamine, as opposed to being able to stare at the computer for an hour without doing anything, just because doing the thing would be horrible. The latter feeling makes you want to quit your academical program (which seems like what the author is dealing with a little bit), or maybe draft your resignation and leave the job market for a bit instead of dealing with the codebase or whatever (which I did, albeit for different and less negative reasons in my case).

I'm also experiencing this currently. I can sit in front of my thesis and stare into the screen for a whole good day. I also can distract myself with a smartphone but that's merely a distraction from the boredom. Around the topic of procrastination, I read "doing the thing would be horrible" for the first time and it just rings so true.

Doing this thing (this kind of work) feels horrible and I know I'll need to do it for many, many more days and weeks and these will all be horrible. There's no way around it. I often subconsciously try to make this time less horrible by experimenting with listening to music, have the TV running in the background or other things. This never really works. Or I just haven't found what I need.

At the end, whenever I do get a good chunk of work done, I feel really good about it. But I also acknowledge that it was horrible and I need rest now. And some dread builds up, reinforcing that the work is indeed horrible and the next chunk will require me to go through it again. The good feeling of getting work done does absolutely nothing to knowing that the work is horrible while you are doing it. It's the type of work (writing, editing) that I detest, not so much the content/topic.

I have no idea what strategy can help here (I welcome suggestions!). Strategies such as Pomodoro do not help me. A 5min break doesn't change that the work is horrible and I'll be doing countless Pomodoros throughout the days/weeks anyway. The amount of horrible work is not reduced and the little breaks don't make it less horrible, so it doesn't help me.

What works for me sometimes is tricking me a bit. Just change this one sentences here and... this one also looks really bad... and when I'm at it, this figure there could use an overhaul... and suddenly you are working on your thesis. Key point here is - I think - that you don't go at it with the intention of doing actual work (which you know is horrible). You just change this stupid sentence there because your inner perfectionist wants you to. Thinking about it like that, the horribleness associated with the work may be a state of mind I can work on. No idea how to though.

You have my curiosity. I am trying to isolate what would make this work.

1) Do backspaces count towards corrections?

2) Would you say this also applies to coding?

3) What seems to be implied is, that this generates something I feel lends itself to "obvious improvements" instead of just throwing away and starting over. Your thoughts?

This is definitely good advice for fleshing out the actual writing, I used this ontop of to the paragraph planning. So you build out a mindmap style plan with part > chapter > section > sub-section > sub-sub-section / figures / tables > couple words for a paragraph. Then you manage everything at the lowest level, you work out how many paragraphs you need by when. You pick paragraphs at random even if you dont have the results or good stuff to say you write the vomit draft of that paragraph. Then you pick just one thats already written and edit it. Repeat until you run out of time. It's the only way I managed to finish my thesis. The other thing I did was always do a writing warm up, so just something free flowing off the top of your head but still a bit technical. Maybe some instructions on how to make a cup of tea for an alien in low gravity. Without a plan though you can't validate you can actually finish, which is insanely important for motivation. You need the concept of % progress and time left. Also you need to know you've done enough work to actually write a thesis or if you need to do more work, and what work you actually need. The definition here is also a paragraph is about 3-5 sentences, a sentence being around 10 words. It is extremely hard to fail to write 50 words. That sense of failing to write is the mind killer. After a session even if that session lasts 20 minutes and you only wrote 50 words you update the spreadsheet showing vomit to edit progress. Until I did all this my progress was almost nothing.

> my goto strategy is similar to what writers call a vomit draft

A "vomit draft" might be good approach to a writer's block. But I think the blog describes a burnout. You probably need actual help to recover from a burnout.

Wow ! That sounds like a very useful technique to me. Will definitely try to adopt that. Thank you.

Vomit draft can be great tool, but there's additional risk in science to keep in mind...

I've heard of a person who advocated this kind of draft, and then did a vomit draft themselves for a research project, with the draft including discussing stand-in results of an experiment that they planned to do.

Their colleague on the project saw the draft, and called out that the experiment had not been done. The writer said that they'd only written the draft to see what the paper might look like, once the experiment was done.

But the person who wrote the vomit draft had a problem doing the experiment...

Then that person submitted the paper anyway, with the vomit draft stand-in experiment results, and the paper got accepted. And without telling the other people on the project.

I understand that the story got a lot worse from there.

The vomit draft wasn't the only problem, but if you see someone vomiting drafts that are effectively scientific fabrication as they stand, I advise being uncomfortable with that, and emphasizing to the writer that this is a more dangerous practice than it might seem.

I think the problem here is that they submitted a fabrication. If someone is prepared to do that, I don't think how they drafted the document is really the issue.

I think, the problem here stems from making vomit draft a social technique instead of keeping it at a personal level. It is potentially harmful if other people can read it. OP describes it as a personal method and it may work by breaking some psychological issues, like a fear of under-perform or something like. But to do this one need to overcome all fears, to get rid of anxiety, and it needs a safe environment where you can write anything. Literally anything, to try it and to show to your mind that it is harmless thing, nothing bad happens, it is ok to write not good enough, because you can dump it later.

The problem is not the technique, but the inmorality of who publish it as something it is not.

Having written 3 dissertations, a bunch of research papers and writing code daily, I'm a huge fan of this method. Sometimes I just create bullet points stating "here i need to talk about this and that" adding a bit of actual information whenever it comes to mind. If I have to write a piece of code that I really don't feel like, i use a mix of comments and meta-code.

The procrastinators among us have now an excellent way to turn their "vomit drafts" into a full fledged document. GPT-3 is able to transform bullet points into something that you can call a draft. I'm still not sure if that's a good or bad thing.

If a tool can help people create genuine research, then that tool is good!

However, I worry on both the plagiarism and correctness fronts. When you aren't writing it by hand, it might be easy to miss both.

I cannot recommend this enough, it's what got me over the finish line after waaay too long, including a year with zero progress writing my thesis, just like the article describes.

Each day, it went the same: sit down, try to write about the work, find some meta problem to occupy myself (like "is this the correct order of topics that I'm planning to write in my outline" or "under which topic does this idea belong") before actually writing about the thing itself, cue an unproductive spiral of research into these distractions. After a couple of hours of not actually doing any progress, drift off into the internet "as a break", and only come back to the thesis for 20-30 minute intervals that are exactly as useless as they sound. Become more and more frustrated, but no more productive, as time goes on.

Vomit drafting suddenly gave me a productive focus. Suddenly it was clear that yes, where I want to put this topic is good enough, or there is this one other place where it makes a lot more sense. No more long internal debates over meta-questions. And I realized that yes, I do have a wide range of knowledge about my specialty, something I'm convinced I was subconsciously blocking on before ("what do I do if I try to write about this topic but realize I'm just too stupid to get it, and was just bluffing all the time?").

This works wonders, especially for collaborative documents (which a thesis should be, a collaboration between you and your supervisor/other people). A first "vomit" draft allows you to at least discuss the concepts, and it forces you to align the thoughts in your head. It is how I have written all my papers/thesis, and I cannot recommended it enough!

This is also recommended by Donald Knuth in one of his technical writing guidelines [citation missing] so +1

There's something there, corroborated by two examples in cinema and litterature: Finding Forrester (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zLBEFvMkQCo) and in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, with the rhetorics professor facing 'my students are stuck write even the simplest essay' problem.

Yes, write something, anything, then edit. These are two different states of mind, two completely different personality parts, and I wish we taught the first one better (and the second one too...). Shut down the critics part when writing. Should down the ego part when editing.

Yes! Hard approach to take for a perfectionist but it’s the only way that works for me too. GitHub receipts for latest project show a lot of regressions. Embarrassing. But better than nothing, and finally got the MVP done. It was your approach that made it possible.

It works for other things as well. I needed to create a „customer portal“ web application for a product I’m working on, and kept postponing it, because I don’t enjoy working on it. The pressure to have it functional became so great that I literally committed a generic dashboard template with just a couple text changes, truly ugly, vomit-style stuff. But it helped me overcome my blockade and start working on it in earnest (and actually enjoying it!).

That’s basically evolution vs design. Design allows you to be stuck in planning mode forever. It’s noble even, because you want to do it right.

I took a similar approach with my thesis, I used voice typing while writing my first draft. The other approach I use in combination is writing every heading and subheading to create a document outline, then fill the gaps. The power of these approaches are breaking down the work into smaller manageable chunks.

I do a similar thing when I’m writing. Except I write on paper and allow myself to make revisions. Being on paper is pretty self limiting as far as edit spirals.

The other trick is when you are stuck instead of writing garbage write down why you are stuck and describe what would go there if you weren’t stuck. Sometimes this gets you to the solution, but if it doesn’t you still have your thoughts on it for latter.

When I wrote my Master thesis, my vomit draft was written on paper with pen. Safe to say it was horrendous and even full of rant and swearing. Yet ultimately I managed to write much more words than directly on LaTex.

And if you're so stuck you don't even know what to do, you can always clean the space around you.

One thing that works for me is to just start writing figure legends. That seems easy, it doesn't feel like "writing the paper". I end up basically writing the results section for that figure or table, so I just cut and paste most of it to the actual results later, and keep a summarized version for the actual figure legend. By coincidence, I'm trying to submit a PhD thesis today (Genetics/Computational Biology).

This right here is "worse is better" in practice!

A thing in the world may well be the worst possible example of that thing that can exist. Yet it exists, so has a couple of key properties:

1) it does something (albeit poorly), not nothing

2) it can be improved upon.

This is going to sound ridiculous but I’m serious: if you can’t even type a whole bunch of stuff, type just a basic (terrible) outline and then feed it to chatgpt to expand on.

The output will be laughably bad, most likely, but you’ll know why it’s bad and you can fix the obvious mistakes and then go from there.

I was going to make this comment but you made it for me

That's what I did as well.

The problem often is fighting the urge to correct things. For me the only thing that helped was sleep deprivation, but probably alcohol has a similar effect.

For this, I highly recommend The Most Dangerous Writing App: https://www.squibler.io/dangerous-writing-prompt-app

It deletes all your work if you don't keep typing. Good motivator.

Then have ChatGPT do the editing :)

This sounds like great advice. In an attempt to see if it works for me, I thought I'd give it a shot, so I set a timer for 2 minutes and started typing a response without a real idea of what I was going to say. I'd say it's pretty effective, but I do tend to fill in a lot of meaningless content as I think of what to write next. I guess the next iteration of edits can trim that out though. I could have used this in the past, and could definitely use it right now for writing some documentation that I am procrastinating on indefinitely. Thanks for the tip. This has been helpful. Not sure if I should actually post this, it's not really contributing much to the conversation, but this is an anonymous account of mine, so who cares. Timer is up.

Nicely done! Not sure I could tell this was not just another HN post if you didn't explicitly say so.

Voice dictation is helpful for this exercise even if you type fairly well.

I highly doubt it. It is the ACT of actually writing that forces you to think what you are doing. Using a voice assistant kills that energy. In fact: even if you -gasp- use pen and paper it would be even more effective than typing. Drop the PC, the smartphone and disconnect when doing this.

> It is the ACT of actually writing that forces you to think what you are doing.

This is incorrect. Everybody is different.

As an ADHD sorta guy, I write much, much better if I can walk around and get my blood moving while dictating compared to sitting with my butt going numb and my brain screaming out in oxidative stress agony as I try to think clearly.

You can take it even further by dropping the pen and paper and use a chisel and stone tablet. </s> While I agree about removing distractions, I would suggest using whatever your most efficient way of communicating is to get the idea or concept out of your head.

I love that this is a substantially nicer read than the kind of stuff GPT generates, and the amount of human effort to produce it is pretty close.

Also known as "write drunk, edit sober" * - where your choice of drunk may be defined as 'producing text unsuitable for others to read in that form'.

* Hemingway may have coined this term, along with "make sure you are 100% offline because the Internet never forgets".

I find that I get stuck in an endless loop of trying to make something perfect and it massively slows me down. I can spend hours changing a paragraph a million times… it’s extremely frustrating!

"Write drunk, edit sober."

Amazing advice. This technique is what got my PhD thesis across the line.

Word vomit and just concatenating together all my current work into a single LaTeX project. Once it existed as a single document and I could start to “see” it as a thesis, even though most of the writing was terrible, the momentum was there.

Currently writing my MS thesis. "Concat all my existing work into a doc" was my initial move as well, and I discovered I had written a little on almost every topic already. In some cases, had written lots.

That let me move to outlining and shuffling things around almost immediately, making writing about filling gaps instead of staring at a page. That in turn let me evolve my writing along with the codebase; now, in late January, I'm well ahead of schedule on written material (knocks on wood)

I had a struggling Lit friend in college who I kept tabs on. She was a late adopter to blogging but she talked a lot about how writers find the motivation to write. It was an early part of my long process of discovering that everyone, everywhere is struggling with the same problems, we just call them by different names to feel special. Writers have tricks that are fundamentally Refactoring, possibly before we had a name for it.

I'm not a Hemingway fan, I don't enjoy his writing and I have the impression that he was a terrible human being, but his advice to other writers is apparently pretty good:

> Quit [for the day] when you know what happens next.

If you want to set yourself up for failure tomorrow, write until you're completely out of ideas today, then go do something else. In the morning, you'll dread going back to the piece because what do you have to say? Anything? Who knows. Maybe you've written everything good you'll ever write. Maybe you're a failure. Maybe sitting down at the typewriter/keyboard will prove your mother was right and you should have become a doctor. So much pressure. I'll go do something else and pretend everything is fine. Or I'll read about the writing process and hope that serves as sharpening my saw while I wait for magic.

When you stop with one item on your TODO list, you have at least one idea left, and having slept, you're more likely to pull on that thread and find two other things you want to write as well. You just have to get started and the creativity will happen. Starting is the hard part. Starting is what kills you before you've even tried.

"[discussing his last exam] Last time I only failed by the narrowest of narrow margins"

"You what? You walked in there, wrote "I AM A fish" four hundred times, did a funny little dance and fainted!"

- Red Dwarf

Forgot who said it but 'shitty first draft' stop thinking start doing

This is legendary Simpsons writer John Swartzwelder's technique, too:

Since writing is very hard and rewriting is comparatively easy and rather fun, I always write my scripts all the way through as fast as I can, the first day, if possible, putting in crap jokes and pattern dialogue—“Homer, I don’t want you to do that.” “Then I won’t do it.” Then the next day, when I get up, the script’s been written. It’s lousy, but it’s a script. The hard part is done. It’s like a crappy little elf has snuck into my office and badly done all my work for me, and then left with a tip of his crappy hat. All I have to do from that point on is fix it. So I’ve taken a very hard job, writing, and turned it into an easy one, rewriting, overnight. I advise all writers to do their scripts and other writing this way. And be sure to send me a small royalty every time you do it.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/j...

I think this a role tools like ChatGPT will fill: spit out a crappy version of something that humans can edit later. It gets you over the hump of looking at a blank page, but isn't itself a deliverable.

I plugged the elevator pitch of "my novel" and asked it to write the plot of that novel (I will never write it, I just like to think about the elements of it and have some notes and snippets) and it spat out almost exactly what I had written out as the longer form of the outline.

I laughed, because I knew exactly how original my thinking was going in. It was really funny (and depressing if I had a big ego) how close it was to my idea.

However, doing so allowed me to iterate a bit and I took a minor aspect of the plot (people don't always have enough to eat) and magnified it (the government is the only source of food and they use this to control people). It has made the story much more interesting (still not super original!).

Last week I was experimenting with ChatGPT for some of the sorts of trade pub columns I sometimes write. I wouldn't have given anything it created straight to an editor--though I've seen worse. But it gave me some bulleted paragraphs that I mostly agreed with and could certainly serve as a starting point for revising and fleshing out with more detail, maybe some numbers, quotes, links, etc.

While it can head you off down dead-ends, having some structure and words to start with tends to be easier than a blank sheet of paper.

“Homer, I don’t want you to do that.” “Then I won’t do it.”

I'm sure that a back-and-forth with Julie Kavner and Dan Castellaneta doing those exact lines would still give me the biggest side-splitting laugh of 1996.

That explains much of the Season 7 onwards...

"There’s one solution that each and every book on writer’s block offers: write five words. Any five words. Follow this advice, Mr. Ashbery, and you’ll never have writer’s block again."

(From "Uncreative writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age" by conceptual poet and "word processor" Kenneth Goldsmith)

Edit: Oh, this historical paper is slightly different angle, but also relevant, helped me quite a bit:

Upper, Dennis. "The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of “writer's block”." Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis 7.3 (1974): 497. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1311997/pdf/jab...

I'd like to try this, but it's tougher when you're collaborating on a shared document.

For example, I collaborate on papers that always start out as a shared Overleaf doc. When I'm starting a new section, I just want to toss some ideas down on the page, knowing that the prose is terrible. I can really enjoy this phase if I know it's free of judgment. However, it's so much harder when I know that someone might open the doc in an hour and judge my writing before I get to edit it - or worse, if I see that they've opened the page while I'm in the middle of it, or god forbid see their cursor click around near where I'm typing. It's a lot harder to concentrate until they leave or start editing somewhere else. I end up taking a while to write each paragraph, planning & editing as I go.

So write it locally in an unshared document and paste it into overleaf when you want someone else to see it? I don't like overleaf to begin with, but to feel this tied to it is a bit wild.

I've tried, but it only works well if it's the beginning of a project. Later on, it gets annoying to sync back and forth between copies as others work on it, since I like to see what I'm writing in the context around it.

You don't even have to type. Text to speech is fine for this and the barrier to getting started is nil. Make a rough outline of what you want to cover and have at it.

I used a somewhat similar technique after I got stuck in my PhD for more than a year: I sat down and wrote a chapter explaining why my research was doomed, because XY could not be properly measured and quantified etc. It turned out that once I had my concerns spelled out on paper instead of tossing them around in my head, proceeding to the actual measuring and quantifying was anything but impossible.

I would love this to be turned into a text editor. You set up a target, e.g. 20K chars and start typing away. No formatting, no distractions. The program always just shows the current line, or even just the 10 characters, while previous lines fade out into black with no way to reveal them. Only after hitting the target is the entire text revealed.

Optionally with some reward animation/sound after every target/10 characters.

> even more extreme

I'm a musician & amateur home producer, and this extreme approach of yours is exactly what I recommend to people (and what I do myself) to overcome the feeling of "I can't get started because what I start on sounds bad and I have an overwhelming fear of making something that sounds bad." Turning it on its head by purposefully trying to make the cliched, trite, and generally whack song I can, can be immensely freeing.

Hey, I'm the author of this blog post. I didn't think anyone would even read it, let alone post it on HN. To be honest it's a little scary how many people are seeing this post since it's basically my 2am anxiety-fueled cry for help. But it's also motivating reading all these comments from people who've had similar experiences and are offering encouragement. I'm reading every one of your replies and they're giving me the confidence that I can be better and do better.

Rooting for you get through this! How did the meeting go?

It actually went really well! It was sort of an informal review of my progress as a researcher in 2022, so it was a great opportunity for me to be straight up about my faults throughout the year. I spent a lot of time before the meeting thinking about where I went wrong, why I did what I did and how I will be trying to improve myself in the coming months (writing this post really helped with that process). Coming in with all that thinking made the conversation more honest and productive. I'm a lot more excited and motivated about pushing forward my projects once I drive back to college this weekend.

I'm also lucky to have a super understanding advisor who is invested in my personal growth.

My dad, who is a professor, used to say "Don't get it right, get it written!".

I would always feel there was more I had to research before I properly started. I missed the deadline for my MSc dissertation and had to start again. In fact, the act of writing it changed my thoughts and led me down more productive paths in the end.

Hi mate, just mentioning that I'm having similar experiences with dreading supervisor meetings, not making progress for long periods of time, getting frustrated, questioning myself and my career choices, feeling my research is not good enough etc.

I also haven't figured it out yet.

I hope you get through the tough times to reach a calmer, more peaceful place in life one day. I imagine it's about persistence and patience, especially being patient with yourself. Good luck my friend!

I appreciate your reply, thank you fellow human hidden behind a veil of 0's and 1's!

I procrastinated on my thesis. I got the usual advice: 'perfect is the enemy of the good', 'just get it written' etc. but it made no difference. With hindsight I now realize that I was working on an unfeasible project with inadequate preparation but did not want to accept that. How do other experienced people, not just your advisor, react to your project? If they are skeptical it may be a worth taking a cold hard look at the entire plan.

I've been having trouble writing my PhD manuscript for more than one year, so the title clearly resonated with me :)

I'm nearly done, I've been doing regular meetings with my advisor and keeping track of progress to help me write. At some point, I guess I realized that any progress is progress, that the thesis isn't going to write itself, and that I don't have to hand over a perfect work.

I wish you all the courage to do the same!

I was supposed to turn mine in last week and have written ... 10 pages.

That was me 13 months ago... If can do it, so can you!

I felt completely burnt out back then (still do to an extent). I wonder if allowing myself to work on something else to relax would have helped? on the other hand, it's much easier to just continue once you're on a streak. And you can alway dig deeper, which is so tempting.

My GF started working on her Master Thesis in 2011. A few things happened like moving to another city and some short jobs here and there. She was really dreading even thinking about it, constantly waiting for next year's updated statistics. Me trying to help also upset her, we were in a bad place in that respect. In 2015 she started going to a university help group but it still didn't really help. In 2016 I convinced her to pull the plug and it's been the best decision in years. Five years seem incredibly long for no result retrospectively, but what can one do.

Everything will be alright, take care.

Wow, some programs do give you a lot of time for your thesis!

as long as we paid the semester fee the university never bat an eye

Public universities usually give you a lot less time, think months, and one may also be constrained by visa allowances. Not sure if it's also the case in the US.

Not sure how is it with PhD, but with Masters and below, my experience (context: public universities, Poland) is that even in a public university you can get quite a bit of extra time if you... just ask for it. Preferably not in the last minute. The staff doesn't have any particularly strong reason to kick you out just for failing to meet a deadline, or even failing a class - the rules can be bent quite a lot if they see you're making an effort and want to complete your thesis / learn something.

Just as long as you don't hit an administrative blocker, that is. In my case, I never submitted the thesis, because my request to extend the time coincided with the faculty being split in two and completely overhauled - so instead of extension, I was told that, because of "syllabus changes", I would need to repeat the entire MSc level (2 years) to be able to submit the thesis now. I politely declined.

Mind boggling. I wrote my Masters thesis in one week. Mind you, it's computer science (I did some work on distributed systems and contributed to the Kubernetes container orchestrator), the professors don't stress that much on the writing as long as you did a valuable work. However, I also saw that as a waste of time, so I was just trying to get rid of it asap and write whatever. It's shocking when I hear people procrastinating for years for such a useless thing.

Congratulations. Other people have other ways of allocating value to their work, of which the written thesis is a crucial component not external to it.

they're not wrong though and I also wrote mine in about a month but yeah, people are different

I started writing mine and got lost in it so thoroughly that I realized - about 8 years later - that it was a bit too ambitious.

The title made it simple Adaptive monitoring.

I worked in a small AI/ML company as an "SRE" (back then we haven't even heard of that acronym), so it seemed like a good fit. Just throw in some predictors, train it on the alerting data (when the oncall person just ignores it and the alert is not solved then it was a real false positive, right?) and so on. Also based on confidence scores decrease sampling rate for stuff that doesn't tend to break. Oh and also the local agent should pull the some pretrained predictors from the controller so it can locally switch to higher sampling if some patterns occur, this would catch those pesky hard to debug transient bugs/errors.

...

truth be told I got lost in chapter 1, because I had no idea what to actually write and implement from all this.

so no thesis, but years later I got a nice part of an ADHD diagnosis out of it!

This is the thesis swamp.

A lot of the young people in these swamps are in a bad place.

The university I attended many years ago almost didn't have that swamp for Master's students. It was largely attributed to students working in small teams thus pulling each other through.

I learned about this when I attended an evaluation group with some of the high-ranking staff members on the faculty. At some universities, most people end up in the swamp and have for decades if not centuries. Unfortunately, it's shameful, so people don't hear about it, and little changes.

If you work as staff at a university with a big swamp, the one single biggest contribution you can do to society is probably help fix the system at that university so people don't fall into the swamp. Even if it means putting your research on hold.

I never finished my 4th year Honours thesis. It was just a point in my life where so much was changing - moving out of home, getting my first full-time job, etc. I already had my Bachelor's degree and life just.... out-ran it I guess.

Looking back now I feel a little bad but I honestly don't regret it. You kind of look back a decade later (it's been much longer than that by now, but I realized this a long while ago) and it just seems insignificant, like a past life. It doesn't actually matter in a sense any more, nobody cares about my degree.

It was a wonderful, formative experience at the time and I don't for a second regret doing it. It's just that life moves on and people change over the years, ESPECIALLY if they started university as young adults. I actually think there should be a hard limit on the time you can spend doing a Masters given what I've heard about them. Or at least there should be more sanely-spaced deliverables. I was lucky in a way that Hons. was only one extra year on my degree, so there was no swamp to fall into at least. I wasn't going to pay for another year and by that time I didn't want to do it anymore.

For a different phase .. if you find your way beyond the current(?) association between the work and an understandable repulsive toxicity experience .. this brief inspirational vid may help with the hard slog needed to finish:

https://youtu.be/KxGRhd_iWuE

<3, stranger

My master thesis, which is supposed to take 8 months, took me 2 years and 4 months.

Every morning I would wake up and think 'today is the day I will do good work!'. And every night I would go to bed and feel terrible and like a failure because no, I did not write or even read a single line. In hindside, I was definitely depressed during these days. I wish someone had told me I needed to get help for my mental health.

I only 'snapped out of it' because of how the student loan system in my country works, and there was a huge financial incentive to finish it before a certain date.

Know at least in part what you're going through. Submitted by crap draft of my PhD thesis in 2003 and then spent 4 years in full time non-academic employment doing the huge list of revisions in my spare time and commuting on a train!

You're doing all the right things - getting help, seeking therapy (I wish I had done earlier), being fair to yourself.

It might be helpful to try the following: Remind yourself why you started the PhD. Look back before you accepted. Might help to talk to friends about this. Why did you accept the challenge? What about yourself meant that you had to do it? Everyone's ignorant of what it entails until after completion and every PhD is different but why did you start at all? Reminding yourself of how brave you were to begin with is important.

Next thing is to divide and conquer. Find the smallest, easiest task of all. It might be insignificant to the final work but it's something. For me it was a paper I had been putting off reading. I decided to code one small piece of it. Not the whole thing, not a reproduction of the results, not beautiful code, just something. For me, that broke the spell.

Finally, accept that it's OK to walk away. Like everyone else here, I believe you can do it - I can feel it from your blog post. That said, it's OK if you don't complete it. Yes, there will be regret but you'll go on to other, brighter things, unshackled and free. That's OK too. You don't have to complete everything you start, that wouldn't be fair to you. I know a good few that didn't complete for a myriad of reasons and they're all doing great. I think you should give it a go but the world won't end if you don't.

Best of luck, will be thinking of you today.

I was at your position. I dragged on a journal and my thesis for 2 years. My advisor literally begged me to get my dissertation done at times. He complained I was a perfectionist and told me all good advice you have here every month for those two years. It didn't work.

Eventually, he told me "How about you ``take leave`` and write whatever and bring it to me". I took one week leave, stayed at home and start writing. Somehow, I finished my first thesis draft in a month after that then I graduated. Those two years was the lowest years in my life emotionally.

I don't have any advice for you because every person is different. This is a battle you need to fight by yourself. Start writing!

I took more than 3 years to write up my thesis. It was the most depressed I have ever been. There are many good comments here and I hope they motivate you.

The advice that worked for me came from a professor in the depart (who was not my supervisor) which was essentially: - Make sure your thesis title is framed as a question - Each chapter should be a subquestion to the general overarching question - Start each chapter by asking the explicit subquestion - Conclude each chapter by summarising the answer to the subquestion and asking the subquestion of the next chapter.

In this way you have an overarching narrative to your thesis - without actually writing it.

Next add the headings and subheading of how you answered each subquestion (I image this will be cutting and pasting what have already written). You can breakdown subheading until each section only requires one or two paragraphs. Then start writing one paragraph at at a time. Do not worry about word count until you have finished a first draft. The narrative will make it much easier to read, understand and finish. You may need to get creative about how the narrative will flow so it makes sense - but you can ask for help with this.

Hope this helps.

There's one thing I couldn't find in your post: do you WANT to finish this PhD?

Also, have you talked to your advisor about this procrastination problem, your fears, and the possibility of quitting? He sounds like an approachable person.

I finished my PhD with more than one year delay from the "normal" time because I also spent basically 2 years playing video games and not doing shit. Today I'm an associate professor with a nice job and good salary... so yeah, you can survive it! :)

But seriously though, let me try to give you a couple of advices: first of all, the idea that you need to work on a project that gets you excited to get up from the bed in the morning is wrong and dangerous. Work is work and PhD is also work, just a bit different from the rest. So yeah you project is still work, so forget about being excited to get up in the morning. Trust me, you will survive even if you are not excited to get up in the morning! It's just work.

Second thing, you made a mistake, which was to involve a million people in your project before you started. You built too much pressure for the results, and that pressure made you scared and killed your motivation to work on it. It's normal to sell the fish before you catch it in academia, but to do that in a healthy and efficient way you need lots of experience (like, decades of it, and being a professor with a stable career so you can take the punch and still stand up). Now that you're back to basics, it'll be easier. Start by making it worth it to you. Work for a few hours a day, like maybe two or three, then go do something you like after that. Soon you will realize that doing the stuff you like after you work a few hours is MUCH more enjoyable than procrastinating (it really, objectively, is). So you'll train your brain to get the reward from the work: hey, if I work for two hours, I can then do X or Y which will be awesome. (Do not plan to work 8 hours a day. You won't).

Third, remember that you (as in, you, a person, a living being) are more important than all of this. It's just work; it doesn't deserve all the attention it gets. So what if there are a few people disappointed with you here and there? You are also disappointed with some people and that doesn't make them go home and cry in the dark. In all probability, there will always be a few people disappointed with you for the rest of your life. Actually, the list will probably grow. :)

Good luck!

Great advice. Personally I think this applies to many long term ambitious, and ambiguous projects, not just a PHD. I had to learn this the hardway as well and now I really enjoy my work in a sustainable way.

As a new PhD student trying to figure out a routine and framework for studies/work, this comment was incredibly helpful! Thanks for writing it out. Bookmarked.

Procrastination is routine in PhDs. It is the norm, you are not alone. Millions have been there before you, millions will be there after you.

First is a 100% anti natural work to do, only using your mind.

Lots of people forget the basics like eating well, resting well, or doing exercise.

For me for example, having a routine of exercise was essential, because your job does not require exercise, like most jobs did 100 years ago.

I feel like something being a "2am anxiety-fueled cry for help" makes it MORE worth seeing (and paying attention to), not less.

Thanks for sharing your experience. I am currently in a similar situation, writing my master thesis. Your words motivated me.

I feel you. I've been there. It took me 9 years to finish. For several years, every Friday I was more depressed because I'd gotten nothing done that week.

To be honest, the only things that helped me were:

(1) stopping taking SSRIs. This was a big one for me. I didn't realize until afterwards what effect they had on the particular type of motivation that a PhD thesis requires.

(2) letting go, a bit, of my original thesis topic. I let my mind wander during a home improvement project and it led to an interesting question that was related but not identical to the original.

One thing I would say is -- don't beat yourself up about it being hard. A PhD is famously hard, and can be exponentially harder depending on your topic and advisor.

A friend of mine took something over a decade to get around to doing his. So, don't despair!

I see your ted link and i raise you my favorite one about creativity and procrastination https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_urban_inside_the_mind_of_a_mas...

I for one appreciated reading this post and as you can see below there are a lot of well off people who have had similar experiences.

OP has two days to write a first draft -- don't give them more videos to watch!

I see your ted link and i raise you my favorite one about creativity and procrastination https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_urban_inside_the_mind_of_a_mas...

I appreciated the post.

Adding my bits of thesis history:

It took me about 10 months to even start working on it. I managed to blast through it by locking myself in the public library for 2 weeks. Most of the first week was screwing around anyway. Funnily enough, I accidentally submitted a rough draft as the final for my committee. They never read it anyways. The final draft has all kinds of errors and 'insert here' kinda stuff.

My SO had to do basically the same thing, only they procrastinated for ~2 and a half years because the grant was really really good. Their thesis is the only published place for some important things in the field, so it's actually been cited a few dozen times.

A friend of mine took about 14 months to get his thesis done. His description of it was: Imagine you're on a green grassy hill, curled up in the fetal position. And on another hill, just a little hill, there is a bar. You have to get over this bar. It's only 6 inches off the ground. So you look at the bar on the hill over there for months, still curled up in the fetal position. And eventually you kinda lump over at the other hill. And you hork, and sprot, and froll at the other hill. And eventually, crying the whole time, you kinda move at the other hill. You repeat this, in spurts mostly, until you kinda pour yourself over this tiny little bar on a green grassy hill. That's writing you thesis.

Just remember, no one except your SO and hopefully your advisor is ever going to read it anyways. Literally no one.

Hey, I own the existence of my thesis (and resulting degree) to Beeminder[0]. I also made use of someone who was my supporter. Someone not involved in any capacity with the project, but who I could send status reports to. This is related to the concept of a body double (search for "body doubling adhd"). Reply if you want to know more or want a chat.

[0] https://www.beeminder.com/home

Also, if you haven't seen it before, read this seminal procrastination post by Wait But Why[1].

Of course it's just a theory, but one that clicked for me and many others. It gives some helpful names to many of the things you experience when procrastinating. Afterwards you'll be able to recognize, "oh, I'm in the dark playground again" and possibly be able to do something about it.

[1] https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrasti...

Hi, shikshake. Next month my PhD will complete six years (+2 of the "regular" 4 years). I still have to evaluate my proposal (finish planning details, invite experts and perform case studies). I am exhausted. I have published 3 papers as first-author, but none of them is actually my core thesis. My graduate program requires minimum publishing criteria, so I pursued this criteria. You need the thesis and the publications, period. But I have a marriage, one kid before the beginning of the PhD, one kid born on the second year, a pandemic on the fourth and fifth year, the discovery of autism of the second child on the beginning of the sixth year. It is too much for me. I am lazy, I procastinate, I am a news addicted. But I have a wonderful adviser. She always says "keep working in whatever you can", "write your way out". It is worth noting that my first two years was spent with a bullying ex-adviser that was more in the business of "filtering" students then properly advising. In almost every business day of last three years I have made some kind of progress, but it was not enough, I am still late. Every time I open the LaTeX editor, I think about quitting. Anxiety is high. I keep blaming myself for the (lots of) bad decisons I made. When I finally can get away of bad feelings, I produce something. I am capable of building the proposed system, but it is taking longer then I thought. I really do not know if I will graduate or not. But what it is working for me is this: 0) Revise the thesis scope (or "I really need to do all this?"), 1) write one paragraph or code function at time, 2) keep a lean todo list (only the essencial). I keep battling because I really need to finish the PhD, as I also think you need. Just write one new paragraph. Or code a tiny feature. After that, start again: a new paragraph/code. Will we finish the thesis before the final deadline? Who knows. But at least we worked until the last day as much as we can. If we (and I hope we don't) fail, I am sure that battling until the very end will make a huge difference in how we deal with the failure.

Here's my thesis procrastination story:

I remember sitting in the explanation lecture, 18 months before the deadline for my undergrad thesis. Even then, I was nervous about handing it in on time. So I did the usual things, made week by week plans, asked my supervisor to check in with me etc. Of course, as a serial procrastinator I didn't come close to sticking to the plan. I fiddled around with a few things but didn't really do anything.

Fast forward to a week before the deadline. I a few broken prototypes and no very little else of the 10,000 word thesis I was supposed to hand in at the end of the week. I finally broke down in front of my professor. In the end I sat around the corner from his office all week as he checked on me every hour or so to make sure I was writing it. I took breaks to go cry in the toilet. I just barely managed to finish it and hand it in on time. I cried again, this time tears of joy and relief.

What really stands out to me, apart from the heroic push at the end, is that in the back of my mind I knew I was going to procrastinate on this project and even that knowledge wasn't enough to stop me. The planning, organization, calendars, todo lists and so on didn't help.

Later in life I was diagnosed with ADHD. With medication and coping techniques things are getting better.

If you struggle with procrastination on a grand scale you have an emotional problem, not an organizational one. No amount of planners, charts, calendars or todo lists will solve it(though they are good to have for other reasons). You need emotional solutions. Therapy, medication, meditation, introspection.

For anyone struggling with procrastination I wish you all the best. It is a lifelong problem. Don't expect to be able to solve it over night, but it can get better.

I've been reading some books recently around taking notes and distraction. The most salient part of the book Indistractable is how distraction is primarily a pain management problem.

The relevant chapter starts with

> But after digesting the scientific literature, I had to face the fact that the motivation for diversion originates within us. As is the case with all human behavior, distraction is just another way our brains attempt to deal with pain. If we accept this fact, it makes sense that the only way to handle distraction is by learning to handle discomfort. If distraction costs us time, then time management is pain management.

Which I felt was a decent stab at the heart of the issue.

> If you struggle with procrastination on a grand scale you have an emotional problem, not an organizational one. No amount of planners, charts, calendars or todo lists will solve it(though they are good to have for other reasons). You need emotional solutions. Therapy, medication, meditation, introspection.

I'm in a similar situation and need help as well. What did you find works, or worked?

Short term: Get someone to make you do things. It could be a family member, a professor, a co-worker. Sometimes people call this body doubling. If you really need stuff done and there are big negative consequences (losing your job, failing your degree) to doing it get help now.

I still struggle with procrastination but I'm much better than I used to be. Here are some things that helped me. Some are ADHD related, some more emotional related.

* Getting diagnosed with ADHD. This gave me insight and the ability to forgive myself. It also gave me access to medication.

* Methylphenidate helps me in a big way. I take a slow release version branded as concerta. The effects day to day are subtle, but after weeks and months I realized things are going much better, my house is cleaner, my work is more stable, my relationships are better.

* Noticing your patterns of procrastination is important. Some people find meditation helpful for this but I could never manage to stick with it. It sounds simple but actually noticing your emotional state just before choosing to procrastinate is surprisingly hard. For me the pattern is often "feeling overwhelmed" --> "wanting to escape" --> "wanting this bad feeling to go away" --> "do something mindless like watching youtube or reading articles". The mindless activity dulls the emotional pain. Even just a 10 second pause of noticing the feeling, staying with the feeling and realising it is simply a feeling can be enough to start to break the habit.

* Distractions. There are many different types of distractions. Make sure your workspace does not have any visual distractions in your line of sight. Being able to see the interesting book you want to read or a notification pop up on your phone is not helpful. Simply placing items behind you is generally enough. Similar with screen distractions. Make sure the things you can see on your screen are relevant to what you are doing now, and anything not relevant is completely hidden/off-screen.

* Completely accepting your procrastination. This is paradoxical, but accepting your procrastination is the best thing you can do. Let's say you spend the entire day aimlessly browsing the internet instead of doing your homework. If you start to think "I'm useless, I'll never be able to do this." or "I wasted the whole day, now I'm going to be even more stressed trying to finish it" you add negative emotions on top off the negative emotions that are causing you to procrastinate. Genuinely accepting what you did and not feeling bad about it is very difficult, but helps you avoid going into a spiral of negative emotions. At least think "Oh well, I procrastinated today. That time is gone, but I can do 5 minutes now and it won't be completely wasted"

* Timeboxing/pomodoros can be helpful. You set a relatively short timer and work for that time, then take a short break. Say, work 20 minutes and take a 5 minute break. Remember, we need to solve the emotional problem, not the organizational one. Serial procrastinators often set unrealistic goals when first learning about pomodoros: "Ok, I'm gonna do 8 pomodoros this morning and really crank through my thesis". Now the expectation is set for doing lots of work, feelings of overwhelm and potential failure will creep in and that's the seed of procrastination. The other failure mode is not taking the short breaks. On some subconscious level you know you've tricked yourself. "Hey, you said we were doing 20 minutes and now we've been working for over an hour." Always take the breaks, and start off by doing a very small number of short pomodoros.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YSfCdBBqNXY

https://www.guilford.com/books/Taking-Charge-of-Adult-ADHD/R...

what ultimately works is asking for help, accepting that yes, it might not be what you want, but it gets you through this hurdle. maybe the next one will be easier. and get up to speed and then work on doing it alone, and then work on doing your best.

Love more hopelessness coming at me.

This 100%. If you understand what needs to be done, you want the long term goal, and yet you still feel severe emotional pain when trying to engage in the work required, it might be ADHD. I highly recommend to anyone who struggles with procrastination that they go see a doctor or psychologist who can assess them for ADHD. And, yes, it takes a skilled professional to diagnose you.

Take heart: “ADHD impairs the functioning of highly intelligent people, so the disorder can be diagnosed in this group. A population-based birth cohort study of over 5700 children found no significant differences among children with high, average, or low IQ and ADHD in median age at which ADHD criteria were met, rates of learning disorders, psychiatric disorders, and substance abuse, and rates of stimulant treatment (Katusic et al., 2011; Rommelse et al., 2017).”

https://www.adhdevidence.org/ics#diagnosed

Thank you so much for posting this. ADHD is not just 'young schoolboys behaving badly disrupting the class'.

The sad thing about that ADHD stereotype is when people are young the stakes are so much lower. Messing around in class, being distracted and not completing school work, in the grand scheme of things, doesn't really matter that much.

If you're an adult things are much worse: unemployment, inability to maintain relationships, impulsiveness and anti-social behavior.

Not to mention rash, irresponsible entrepreneurism…

>If you struggle with procrastination on a grand scale you have an emotional problem, not an organizational one. No amount of planners, charts, calendars or todo lists will solve it(though they are good to have for other reasons). You need emotional solutions. Therapy, medication, meditation, introspection.

Exactly correct. If you're already in a PhD program, well-meaning organizational and motivational techniques are likely not what you need.

What can be labeled as procrastination may be an emotional dysregulation or as Dr. Jen Wolkin calls is " procrastination isn't laziness, it's a trauma response"

https://twitter.com/drjenwolkin/status/1574795724419653636?s...

To anyone who has felt this way, I am so sorry and you are not alone and there is help. If you're in school, access student health and the graduate programs health resources and leave programs. There still is so much unnecessary stigma and shame around mental health, but if you had similarly severe physical health problem, getting treatment and help would the first step. Not trying to brute force your way through it.

You might like this very short article in the New Yorker about a cafe for procrastinators with varying levels of supervision. I immediately thought of it when reading your post. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/01/02/coffee-with-a-...

A question to the community:

I find it a bit weird how as an undergraduate you have no idea what a PhD is like. At the same time, no-one really tells you. Everyone just says "research is quite different to doing an undergrad degree". I have not encountered any educational little seminars or support systems that basically tell you: look, this is is what doing a PhD is like, this is what you generally are expected to do, these are milestones that are average/good to have at these times within your PhD, these are examples of people having done a great PhD, and so on.

If your supervisor is a bit hands-off then you're kind of thrown into a job/position and are just expected to figure out what you should do or how it works. I find this odd and very inefficient. Especially in view of how little a fresh graduate student knows.

Anyone else finding this weird? Is it similar or different in industry/non-academic jobs?

Its not about efficiency, it is an exam situation.

what is the exam?

Sorry i didnt see your post

Its examining you for the ability to make an independent scientific contribution. Its an exam situation similar to your Bachelor and Master in that matter, only on a higher level.

One of the most difficult parts of the Phd is long term planing and coming up with a good plan to tackle your research question.

It is extremely weird. Certainly my experience when I did my PhD was not a great one. Combining someone who was not mature enough to self direct with a supervisor who didn't know how to manage was a terrible combination.

I managed to muddle through, and I did learn a lot over my time. But it's definitely ones of those situations that you back on and wonder what could have been achieved under different circumstances.

Edit - to be clear I did my PhD in the UK around 1993 - things are probably quite different now.

I just finished last year in the US and your first paragraph sums up my experience.

If it’s any consolation, I do believe being in that situation has made me a better manager/mentor.

Definitely. Marathon metaphors aside (I ran an actual marathon during grad school, which would be a closer metaphor if there were no cheering crowds and your coach threw banana peels at you most of the way), I've come to realize that there are very few experiences like it and I'm glad to know they exist.

It is incredibly weird.

I can only speak for CS academia and industry. It is very different in the industry.

In my industry jobs, there is a lot of structure. New grads are often given very close direction and very specific tasks to complete for at least 3-6 months. Then over the next 1-2 years what's expected from you becomes less and less clear, gradually, until you can function somewhat independently. A new grad complaining to a skip that they were not given clear tasks was a Major Fail for their manager/TL. Your manager/TL is required to do this for a new grad, or they were dinged.

In my academic life, you had about as much structure as your advisor provided. About half the advisors did have a plan and genuinely cared. The other half just expected their students to figure it out. It's the students of the former that "succeeded" - i.e. went on to do novel meaningful research. The rest either muddled through till something clicked, or quit. A new student couldn't complain to anyone. There was no structure beyond your advisor. Your entire future is basically in the hands of one person.

I think the problem is that most students think a PhD is just like studying a bit more, but that's not what it's meant to be. It's largely a multi-year solo project with some support, and it should set you up to become an independent researcher.

Part of the problem is that most "university" studies, especially US colleges, are too similar to high school with rigid schedules and teachers closely leading classes throughout the semester. Other models where students are more responsible for organizing and completing their studies foster building independence at an earlier stage already.

When it got to the writing-up stage of my PhD (social sciences) I tried to avoid procrastination by setting myself a target of 500 words a day. I figured that if a thesis was 100K words, knocking out 500 a day would get me there in less than a year. I put a few extra rules in place (they needed to be 'good' words, edited, revised and not just enough to hit the word target) but once I hit that target I felt like I had made progress towards the larger goal - even if just a little bit.

Daily targets became sections, sections became chapters, and eventually I had my thesis. Had I not worked to this sort of structure I am sure that I would have put it off one more day, one more week...and never got there even if the research was done.

This is actually how you get anything properly done in regards to your brain chemistry (according to current knowledge). Reaching goalposts consistently propagates the drive to continue.

This is not procrastination. This is what I would call a common phenomena of lack of consequences. With no feedback loop, the author has little impetus to complete the work.

An in-law lost their house 20 years ago, their mom took them in and they haven’t worked a day in their life. They have learned that doing nothing is a winning strategy.

My son had severe school problems during Covid because everyone was socially promoted. He got a B while not learning anything, because there was no negative consequence to not studying (and we tried to stay on top of this but grades and assignments were not tracked anywhere). We had to get him to private school and six months of difficult times catching up to his grade level.

Most of us need feedback to improve ourselves. There are a precious few who can complete things through sheer force of will. But most of us, I posit, need real world feedback (both good and bad) to live by.

In the case of the author, trying to put this the nicest possible way, they seem to have spent 12 months in advanced studies not doing the work. The blame should not be entirely on them for this, the school and advisor should have escalating consequences for failing to push forward.

I recommend you three books, because as academic I expect you to like thinking:

  1. The now habit. Understand what anxiety and procrastination is. Where does your anxiety comes from? You probably are comparing yourself with what you should be doing, or with what you should have done in the perfect world. There is no perfect world.

  You were the "planner", the strategist, but someone else did the dirty job, the boring stuff. A good planner will usually become a terrible action man, because it requires a completely different mindset.

  Action or execution requires totally different strategies from managing-planning. First, it requires no planning, no time spent planning and deciding because it has already been decided.

  People that are good strategists usually are people that love to think all the time, hence it becomes natural to them. Now, if they need to execute something that has been decided(even by themselves!!) they continue expending time and effort looking for a better solution, for a better plan and the law of diminishing returns kicks in. As planners they could spend 100% on it, be specialists, but now it is a terrible strategy.

You need to be able to be two personas in one. From a person that only cares about planning and making decisions to someone who only cares about what is in front of his or her until the work is done.

  2. Atomic Habits. Use proven strategies that work. Do not care about results, only care about good habits, because they produce results automatically.


  3. The book of no. If you have problems, you state them clearly. We don't need another PhD, we don't care. Do you care about what you are doing?  Nobody forces do to do it, you do it because you want it or else you just don't do that.

It’s okay to quit. The academic world has exploitation baked into it so it’s rare for people to be told that directly by those benefiting from your continued participation, but it’s okay to quit. If the thesis is making you this miserable you might not be cut out for research, and that’s okay. There are many other easier and more economically fruitful ways to spend your life.

I quit my PhD and it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I came pretty close to killing myself (no exaggeration) during my PhD because of how much shame and humiliation I felt about not succeeding at something for the first time ever in my life. I made regular visits to the rooftop of my lab building at night where I would sit crying and trying to work up the nerve to jump off. If that’s how you’re feeling, just leave. It’s not worth it.

If you can find your way into tech you’ll soon be making more than all your professors without having to spend another decade or more going through the hazing process known as the tenure track. The grass is most definitely greener.

> There's lots of people in similar situations, and I'm sure a few of them finally broke out of it.

I went through a very similar death spiral as a grad student. Frustration leads to dread leads to slower progress leads to more dread leads to no progress and depression.

I wish I had some magic trick to reset my mind in times like that, but I don't. I wound up dropping out and went to industry instead... and while the failure stung at the time, it was the best decision I ever made. Academia is a job. If your job is making you miserable, it's probably time to move on to another job -- especially if you have marketable skills. For me at least, it was so much easier to reset facing new problems, problems that I didn't go to work dreading.

My big takeaway was that this is a failure state for me, and that I need to be aware of myself and head it off before I'm trapped. I need to therapy, coaching, or other help before the death spiral sets in. But breaking out of it and making progress on the hell-project? I dunno, sorry.

I'll also say that, if you're like me, you may have struggled with suicidal thoughts. The thought that kept me sane, prior to leaving, was reminding myself that it would be ridiculous to kill myself over work. Work isn't the purpose of living, being at the top of your field isn't the purpose of living, even being an academic isn't the purpose of living. There's billions of people on earth living fulfilling lives with boring, mundane jobs, finding satisfaction in friends and family and hobbies instead... so I would remind myself that, worst come to worst, I'd go find a boring, mundane job to pay the bills and find my satisfaction elsewhere.

I know this feeling. It took me eight years from when I entered my PhD program until I handed in my thesis. Three of those years I was away from campus working part-time, but I was still trying to do my thesis during those week.

It sounds like you are putting too much on yourself. If I can say so from reading the post, it also sounds like you have a bad advisor. Research is HARD. It is by it's nature, ambiguous and risky, and it can be very difficult to distinguish "productive failure" from just spinning your wheels. This is what your advisor is here to help you do, and it doesn't sound like he is helping you do that.

I had a similar advisor and while I thought he was nice for not punishing me when another week went by and I hadn't made any progress, he was really just enabling my poor habits. I was always reluctant to switch advisors because I thought I was smart enough to do it on my own, but the sunk-cost fallacy overcame me.

Eventually, though, I did take the leap and switch advisors six years in (when I returned from part-time work). My new advisor was great. We both agreed that my goal was not to set the academic world on fire, but to complete my PhD and with her support I completed a thesis I was proud of.

One final thing: My story is an uncommon one. Virtually everyone else I knew who "took time off" from grad school never completed their PhD. That's ok and I have just as much respect for those who left, because I know how difficult that decision is. It's usually the right one, though.

One strong influence on not coming back if taking time off is, I believe, the comfort one attains from a steady income. You worked only part-time which may have mitigated that influence.

I never made that connection, but I think you're right. Had I been earning double I probably would have adjusted to a non-graduate-student lifestyle and been reluctant to return.

That is not procratination. Procrastinators will avoid a task to verz best end and then do the least minium to get the job somehow done. You avoided and anvoided and then quit. I think this is a personality disorder called (anxiously) avoidant personality disorder. And I am not saying that to label or to fret you but to help. If you know the name and shape of your enemy it is easier to fight it. Please go and talk to a psychiatrist. A behavior therapy can help immensly.

I am a bit confused about the problem. Most of the comments are about getting past a writing block, but my (possibly incorrect) interpretation was that the sticking point is in doing the research work that would be reported on in the thesis.

I infer this partly because of the discussion of bringing undergraduate students and other graduate students into the research team. Obviously, such a team has nothing to do with writing. And, at one point, the author talks of dismissing the others, with an intention of carrying on, alone. These things gave me the idea that the block is not in writing, but rather in completing the pre-writing work. So, the wonderful writing advice -- and I mean that, what I see here is well-informed and heartfelt -- might not be the main thing the author needs.

The thesis advisor seems like a very good person, being patient, encouraging, and supportive. I don't think too many advisors would go out of their way to employ others to help in a thesis project. A more common approach is to simply cut off funding for the postgraduate student after a certain time, or if insufficient progress were being made. Given these things, it seems to me that the advisor has been a good help to the author.

So, what to do? At the most basic, the choices are (a) to carry on or (b) to leave the program. Both choices can be good ones. And making a choice can be the sort of self-empowering step that leads to very good things in life. So, my advice is to make a choice. It can be time-limited, if that helps, e.g. "I'll give this another month, and if I'm not happy, I'll leave." Please note the word happy here. That is very important. Life is short. Life also proceeds in a directed fashion -- you can't go back and change something that happened years ago. Make your future be good for you. Hope for -- no, expect -- that you will be happy, and productive, and that you will use all the experiences of your life to find ways to make others happy, and productive.

This is all very vague, I admit. But I've seen many students get into a rut that is really quite corrosive to the soul. Making a choice, knowing that it's your choice, can be quite freeing. There are many paths in life, many ways to contribute to this world. Don't underestimate your ability to find the path that's right for you.

Agreed that it sounds like a research block than a writer's block. I would also infer if students were struggling at some point but were doing fine before, they all reached the same set of blockades.

I agree with the parent.

When I read the original poster's story, I felt this smells of poor supervision. A sympathetic supervisor might be a compassionate/"nice" person, but still a poor manager: he should have immediately objected to set up a monster team of students; it's hard to succeed in teams of professionals, but students' goals are not aligned with your own, so they bound to walk away eventually. Nobody can blame them for prioritizing their exams. That's why there are Research Programmers.

What I conjecture might have gone wrong is nobody helped the OP to divide the original project idea into manageable chunks of work that lead to sub-results that lead to smallest publishable units. A Ph.D. thesis is a marathon, not a sprint, and you need to plan accordingly, with milestones every now and then so that the supervisor (and his funders!) can be fed interim results in the form of publications. These milestones also motivate yourself, and they de-risk your project, so that at the end, your thesis can be produced by (slightly simplifying here but only slightly):

  cat paper1.tex paper2.tex ... paper3.tex | pdflatex > phd-thesis.pdf

Think about what sub-questions your overall research question can be split into? What code do you need to write and what experiments do you need to run to support your "central thesis" (which one poster in the above writing advice rightly recommended should be formulated as a question with sub-questions)? In the papers I read about procastrination, the reason commonly given is being overwhelmed by a huge monolithic problem. The good news, then, is: you as a computer science know "divide and conquer" the technique that is the cure for monolithic disease - create little chunks that you can solve, publish, and use as building blocks. Each of them won't be scary. It follows that a finite sequence of non-scary steps won't be scary.

Ask experienced researchers around you for help in dividing up your research into manageable, implementable, publishable chunks. Remember: A Ph.D. thesis is an argument that your "central thesis" holds, so think hard what you need to show and how you can decompose bigger items into sub-questions. I wish you success, and most of all, stay sane!

I know you can do it, because I read your very well articulated post, and problem analysis is 90% of the solution, you also seem to know how to ask for help when you get stuck.

This is pretty typical of PhD students that make others work for them (that's not what is expected of you, you are not a professor, you are their assistant) and don't have good professors to help them learn good leadership practices. They take too big of a task and aren't good managers yet and have to deal with a crowd of unreliable workers. Undergrads are notoriously unreliable due to a lack of experience, high confidence and low time flexibility. They often have high course load and finals, must find their next lab and so on. Also as an undergrad when you see your project leader beeing lost, you look for an escape and put your effort in things that will matter more (you very well know that paper will not be written in time) because you know that nothing will get out of this project in a reasonable time frame.

My 2 cents if you are stuck in a situation like that, put in a single document everything you have. All the methods you have used, the results. These are easy to put and do not require any creativity. Then you start explaining context, concepts and what you planned and where it could lead. No need to make pages. Make lists. After that everything is about fluffying those lists at your own pace.

Writing is almost never a linear endeavor, even more the first time you do it.

Whatever happens being you finishing that into your article(s) and dissertation or quitting will at least make sure that nobody worked for nothing.

I spent 7 years procrastinating my master's thesis. I'd been working full time at a regular job, where I could do a project that the university allowed as a valid Master thesis subject. Between the start of the project and eventually finishing, I had 2 kids, learned all there is to know about Bitcoin, and fully renovated a new home.

Don't beat yourself up about the procrastination, but also don't beat yourself up over the lying and deflection that you did. There is a significant number of students going through the same thing. It doesn't make you a bad person, or even a very poor student. You just got derailed, and had difficulties getting back on track.

To me, it was a very educative experience. I learned a lot about myself and my abilities.

A bit of self-knowledge goes a long way. If you are prone to procrastination, tend to have grandiose visions of what you’re going to do, like to avoid conflict, reach for various ad hoc rationalisations when you underperform, like to really perfect your work, prefer to work by yourself, get easily derailed when you hit a snag… then guess what, you’re going to suffer a lot working on very open ended projects like a PhD (myself included). The trick is to acknowledge your own proclivities from the start and either don’t do a PhD or accept that every single day you must fight to the death with your own torpor.

I was in a similar situation when I was doing my master thesis which took two years. The advisor was not helping much and I would disappear for a month after each meeting. I would sleep day in day out, go to the lab, open all my work stuff and then spend the day surfing the web. I couldn't look at my work and could not think properly. All this while being an international student in a country with totally different culture and paying $1000/mo for tuition fees. My visa was expiring and the tuition fee was due to be bumped up 20%. Accrued 7k in debt. Finances were hit hard and I was drowning in depression to the point that I did not leave the house for two months (other than the grocery store).

How did I get out? I knew for sure that if this ends, then everything turns for the better. So started to to think about the life after the thesis.

First went to the uni counsellor and sought therapy/help. Requested a refund due to mental health issues (luckily one year granted).

I knew I needed one final leg of work to be done to finish. Tried to write a few words every day and possibly created the worst draft of a thesis. Sent it to the supervisor and convinced them to set a date for the defence. The date was two days before my visa expired.

Did a terrible defence which they reluctantly agreed to give me the accepting grade. Tried to finalise the graduation stuff that day to make it to visa appointment the next day. Missed that so had to postpone but eventually turned out fine.

Directly went to a company I used to work part-time and asked them to hire me full-time. Requested a month of salary in advance to be able to pay the rent.

Started working immediately and paying off my debt. Life started to get better. Moved out of that town after a year and didn't step on the campus for the next 7 years.

Not sure if there's much for you in this story. But the only thing that kept me going was the certainty I had that once this thesis is over, my life will change for the better. Crawl your way out of it whatever it takes. Quitting was not an option for me (legal/visa reasons). I understand you might not want to quit a PhD as well. So just try to finish it with bare minimum quality. Don't shoot for the stars and if you're high on some achievement one day don't let that change the goal of only finishing it.

Wishing you the best and rest assured, better days come after this.

I was in same situation, bro ! But mine is Master thesis, to work on very simple Neuron network to recognize numbers.

Alright, i was using Matlab at that time, it's frustrated topic as i have no clue why things work or didn't work.

So procastination was what happened.

Memorable, for the last year two years I've been working on identifying structural causes of procrastination caused by working from home and working on a digital device.

While I'm sure there are personality factors that are affecting your productivity, there are a number of factor in play that are beyond your control.

I've worked closely with a number of CEO's and thesis writers helping them out of the slump.

I'f you DM me, I'd love to have a call with you to give a number of pointers how to get more productive immediately and also to help you find professional help to ease the possible underlying factors that tend to cause procrastination.

This one isn't memorable's original post on the bearblog -- if you click the username in the posted link, there is a contact form to the person in the situation. Very nice of you to offer help <3

> i'd love to have a call with you to give a number of pointers how to get more productive immediately

Why not share with the group, a lot of us might benefit from such pointers. I know I would, too : - )

> At this point I'm seriously considering quitting. I just don't have what it takes to earn this degree.

I'm sure you do have what it takes. But theres a difference between having something and using it. I have what it takes to learn Japanese. Am I gonna learn Japanese? No. Because as much as it sounds like a nice idea, there's other things I'd rather do with my time. I want it, but not nearly enough to do it. (although that's a bad example, because I could learn it one hour per week and finish it in 10 years. I'm not starting it because the process is intimidating in a toil-y way rather than a spark-my-creativity way)

If you could do only one thing with your life, with no problems for money, time, motivation, etc, what would that be? Go do that. Because no matter how hard it is, it's the one thing you want to do with your life. And you only get one life.

Before you leave the PhD, what can you do to take advantage of where you are in life right now? Meet more people around you, attend a lecture series, go dancing with fellow classmates, take an art class, join a theater troupe. You don't know - maybe you'll meet your future wife while you're distracting yourself from your PhD, and later this will be the funny story you tell about how you met. Don't take it so seriously. Just find something that feels valuable about your current situation, enjoy it, and let go of the guilt.

This very might well be their one thing already... but the risk of failing your "one thing" is so paralysing because then who are you without that?

In that regard the second part is good advice: "diversifying the portfolio of who you are as a person". It might not help finish the thesis, but will help life feel more whole if they don't.

Did anyone actually bother reading TFA? Most comments are about writing a thesis. But OP is mostly complaining about not making progress in research that will end up in the thesis.

OP mentioned of an elephant in the room: not having any progress for the last X months. But there may be a second elephant that has gone unnoticed: OP may have already done enough to formulate and defend a coherent thesis. Or, the missing part isn't required to be as grand as the OP had imagined for their latest project, when it started.

Many people may have a strong sense of pride and want to finish what they start. But this is really one of the times one needs to push their pride aside and be practical, mostly for the sake of their mental health. I would recommend to anyone in similar position to (a) compare their research output with that of past PhD students in their group, (b) openly discuss with their supervisor the minimum requirements for approving their thesis.

Another practicality to keep in mind is that from a professor's perspective, a PhD graduate with a less than stellar thesis is preferred over a dropout student. Also, for PhD students interested in pursuing academic career, these days postdoc work is probably more important than a stellar PhD thesis.

I'm also in the same boat. I've been trying to complete my Bachelor's degree since 2011. I've been working on a pre-thesis assignment since 2021.

However, I recently found a solution that works for me:

I commute to work for one hour every day. In May 2022 I had a car crash and wrecked my car. Not having the money for a new car left me stuck with using the train to get to work. After a few days I was already looking for something useful to do with my daily two hours I spent on trains. It was a hassle, too, because I have to change trains 2-3 times.

So, I installed Linux on my laptop and configured it for maximum battery life and, more importantly, making bootup, hibernate and resume as quick as possible.

I did that, so I can pull out my laptop even if I'm just spending 15-10 minutes on one train, and do something with my time.

So every day, before and after work, I make a little tiny progress on my thesis. And it quickly became a habit, too. I can't avoid it, because I can't avoid going to work. And there's not much else I could do with that laptop.

So, even on days when I don't feel like it, I always think: "might as well work on my thesis"

It worked so well, I even missed my stop once because I was too focused!

> I don't know when things started to go wrong, but the work eventually began to stagnate. Tasks were taking longer than anticipated. I began dreading team meetings because I had to address that things weren't getting done. As we approached the end of the semester, students needed time to study for finals, which meant even less work getting done. The project turned from something that I woke up excited to work on, to something I hated even thinking about. I avoided the topic as much as I could when talking to my professor.

This is the turning point. Before this point, there was progress and enthusiasm. After, stagnation and revulsion. Something happened. The author knows it, but can't elaborate.

Some have offered advice on the writing aspect ("vomit draft"). Writing doesn't appear to be this author's problem - it's working on the project itself. The author "hates" even thinking about it. No research progress means nothing to write about. Writing more effectively won't solve the problem because the problem isn't writing.

The problem is motivation. The author started with a project that was going to be awesome. Then little things started to go wrong and didn't get fixed. Those little things snowballed into big things. The disappointment and shock of watching an awesome project with buy-in from authority figures and lavish resources reverse so decisively has undermined the author's ability to move the project forward.

I'm speculating, but these things tend to follow a similar pattern.

I'd recommend that the author try to understand the turning point. What actually happened? What was the first indication that something was not right with the project? What did the author do about it? What pattern of behavior can the author pick out in responses to unexpected problems?

I don't have any tips to add here other than I feel you and I have dealt with similar feelings when I was doing my uni degree (I haven't done a thesis or something similar mainly because I hate writing long form stuff!)

I used to procrastinate working on assignments or watching lectures because I was afraid I wouldn't understand the content and I'd fulfill the belief that I was not smart enough to be studying comp sci, which inevitably led to not having enough time to properly study and understand the content or do assignments!

But over time it took me a little less time in order for me to get started on that assignment or watch that lecture. You're most likely not going to greatly improve your organisation overnight, but as long as you are seeing small bits of progress, that's what matters.

After reading the other posts on your blog, I'm not entirely convinced that procrastination is your real problem. You've already seen a therapist, I think you should continue doing that. And ... if something makes you truly unhappy, don't be afraid to let it go.

Hey, I'm the author. I fully agree procrastination isn't my main problem, but I think it stems from my inability to regulate my emotions properly. I've started journaling and meditating to try and take back control of my brain. Therapy is also something I'm considering taking up again.

This blog started as my hidden corner of the internet to cry into the void (and practice pure css web design) which is why my posts are all so depressing

(I've not read the above mentioned content but as a general principle:) It's worth noting that emotional regulation is a part of ADHD that doesnt get talked about as much as other aspects and is one if the things that the meds help with.

https://www.additudemag.com/adhd-medication-emotional-dysreg...

I'm not sure the author will ever read this, but I am also a PhD student, have been one for far too long, and in the past have struggled with similar `time management' issues, though I'm not sure that's really the problem. As time passes, especially when things go wrong, projects and writing become very emotional. Having memories of looking at something a few years ago and looking at it again a few years later to try to resubmit it tends to trigger guilt, anger etc in me. I've found some strategies to help me, because I'm close to finishing and think the marginal benefit/marginal cost makes sense (benefit is large, finish your phd in 2 years, 1 year, 6 months, depends on where you are).

One tool I use to help me work even when I'm not feeling it is Focusmate (google it). I've found that sometimes, working out my issues is useful , but sometimes the emotions are overpowering and no amount of working them out will make me not regret something. That used to make me stop. Nowadays if I use Focusmate, I tend to think less of such `large picture' issues and instead work on just a little bit, and get a little done. then after a day, a get more done, and so on. I do sometimes get upset and avoid it altogether, but I'm definitely much better at `time management' this way. Also, I don't want to leave a focusmate in the middle of a session, i just need to stick around 25 minutes, and the feelings can pass and i can even enjoy some of the craft of the specific thing I'm doing. I hope it helps someone.

Those are rookie numbers. I procrastinated on a research paper for 4 years. My brother now has a nearly finished bachelors thesis for 14 years. Granted, he has more important issues.

This is writers block and is very common, don’t give up.

My solution was to stand in my lab for hours with an iPad on a stand and dictate 70 pages of my thesis.

It was actually an invigorating experience and you learn a bunch of random Siri/dictation syntax to boot.

Also, if I were to do it again today, try using chatgpt to write the bulk fluff from some outline concepts. The quality of your thesis doesn’t matter as much as doing the bare minimum to graduate :)

It helps to write down what the real problems are, why it is so difficult now.

And then take a step back. Be pragmatic. Maybe some earlier decision was wrong and needs to be changed, to simplify, to remove some of the goals, so that you can realistically finish something in a reasonable time (think about days, max 1-2 weeks), which is useful, and can be shown. Then later you can still extend it, and maybe work on some of the other goals.

It sounds from reading your post that you need to have an honest conversation with your supervisor.

And - he needs to be honest with you about what's possible from this point onwards.

Currently, you are trying to sugar coat the situation and he is too nice to really challenge you. He's probably fallen into the "Ruinous Empathy" trap and it's damaging you.

You need to at least be prepared for the honest answer to be that there is no way forward.

Some questions that you both need to answer (I'm making some assumptions here as I don't know what your thesis is about).

  - Do you even know what your thesis is about?
    - What's the question it's trying to answer?
    - What's the hypothesis on the answer?
    - How are/were you going to test the hypothesis?
    - What's the conclusion going to be?
  - Do you have enough experimental results to answers any of the above
    - Is it feasible to do more experiments
    - If it's not feasible to do more, can you add in enough theoretical discussion/hand waving to get a thesis out of it

Hey, i know you probably didn't expect this to be at the top of HN and there's a lot of comments here.

But I hear you. I largely feel similar about my PhD (even though I'm not as far a long). It's an isolating experience, but you don't have to do it alone. I think it's great you are taking steps for your mental health.

Also, you don't need a PhD to enjoy life.

> And him saying that it's okay, to take my time, to be compassionate with myself.

Maybe this is part of the issue. In my CS department, when this happens, the advisor has to raise up the problem. Then a concrete solution must be found. For instance, defining concrete steps and deadlines, and possibly stopping the PhD if things really don't go forward.

A lot of people are subject to procrastination, so it's not about blaming and making students feel guilty. But they should be helped, as it's not making the student a favour to let the situation drag forever.

Personally, I also had months of procrastination during my PhD (and still suffers from procrastination, I think it's anxiety related and imposter syndrome). But somehow, I managed to get it done, even though my PhD could have been much better than what it was. I think what helped me most was to have extra tasks to get the ball rolling. For instance, teaching a class: there's a well-defined scope and deadline.

I've had similar funks throughout my PhD and thesis-writing experiences. It's hard to fish out the mantras that kept me going at those times (though I have backed them up in notes that I will revisit after some distance from the time), but a recurring one was:

I'm going to feel like shit whether I do or don't do anything, so I might as well do something

Discussing some issues with friends and/or others in your cohort will likely make you feel less alone than browsing other doomposts on r/GradSchool.

With writing in particular, I've recently felt handwriting to be the limit of my writing production, i.e. given a fixed length of time, my output will be independent of whether I wrote or typed it. The affordance of writing slows me down just enough to craft the same text I would've (re)^(n)typed on computer. Writing is also more expressive and makes it easier to forget about my butt in the chair.

What a crazily vulnerable post, cheers man and hope it gets figured out

The first ~70% of the time I worked on my thesis were reading, taking notes and organizing them. It felt like procrastinating at the time, but after that the thesis basically wrote itself.

For all projects where getting going scares the heck out of you I recommend this quote by Franz Kafka:

> Beyond a certain point there is no return. This point has to be reached.

It's a bit random, but when I went though this, it made me feel better to realise that it's a fairly common human experience.

In particular, finding that people whose work I admired admitted having similar issues, Douglas Adams for example:

> I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

Is a line from a book, but he in reality had his agent confine him to a room in order to get books done. Many other artists and authors talk about the systems they use, like the Seinfeld calendar or writing X words every morning.

I like the metaphor of the elephant and the rider. You need to keep both parts of your brain happy for them to work together:

https://abrilliantmind.blog/why-do-we-procrastinate-the-elep...

i procrastinated on my bachelor's thesis for ~5 years. the school ended up changing the graduation requirements before i finished it.

never underestimate the power of stubbornness.

I think that if you can't get yourself to do something for a long time, it's because you truly don't want to do it but haven't admitted it to yourself. Probably you have a strong vision of who you are -- a PhD student, an eventual academic -- and it turns out it's in conflict with some other part of your identity, what you actually want to do.

You'll find instant peace if you admit that you don't want to do it and stop feeling like you should. It is fine, actually, to do a thing until you realize you don't want to and then change your mind, but it's tied up in a bunch of other stuff so it's hard to see that clearly.

To start, I find strange that other students were hired to work in his/her thesis. I doubt even that this is allowed in some countries.

Focusing in minor tasks to be completed in a different working environment could help, but without specific details about the case and the specific knowledge area, we can't know if the author is beating a dead horse or not.

"I tried X medication" and "I went to therapy" are two big red flags to me. He seems to be looking for a magic solution or somebody else that does the hard work. This is not how thesis work

The problem is your advisor sent you on an unknown journey. A Ph.D. thesis isn't a postdoc project. You needed guidance on the journey and course correction but didn't receive any.

I also went on an unknown journey but the difference was I had a weekly meeting with my advisor and we talked and tried to find a solution. I wrote a few pages in my thesis explaining all our failed approaches. But the difference was my advisor helped me. He saw me working on a dead-end solution and he said it doesn't work to find a different solution. After 5 or 6 attempts, we found a solution.

PhD advisor is not necessary someone who knows the topic. It's someone who teaches you the research and guides you.

Don't give up.

It might help to seriously look at why you want a PhD and whether you still want it. There's no shame in going a different direction (i.e., drop academia for industry), if you find out that you have zero inspiration and it's not for you. Success is not measured in either having or not having a PhD. But if it's something you desperately want to have because of what will come after your PhD that can only be achieved with one, that can provide motivation to just push through even if you hate it. Either way I wish you success.

(PS. Don't let sunk cost be your primary motivation for finishing it.)

I did nothing for 18 months when I was writing up. I think the problem was that I wasnt sure what I was supposed to be writing. Instead, get up late, open my thesis document, send emails, go for coffee, go for lunch, read replies, send more emails, go for coffee, websurf and then go to the pub. When I finally figured out what I needed to write, it all came out in 6 weeks. It was no great discovery, just along the lines of: what did you do, why, what's the current state of knowledge, what was the outcome, what worked, what didnt, what's the contribution, what's next.

There seems to be a faint correlation between procrastination and Bear blogs. Here are two different entries from different authors that I've favorited, both because the struggle is real and relatable, and from the immense amount of discussion both sparked. I look forward to seeing the same with this one.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31285969

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31426683

Is Bear the new Xanga or something

Bear is very easy to use and could feel more like journaling than blogging!

I directed a short film on scientific models while procrastinating writing my masters thesis.

https://youtu.be/dkTncoPqo5Y

I coauthored a series of papers on a rock mechanics experiment while avoiding working on my PhD (which was in computational social science).

Procrastination seems to have only demonstrated to me in my life that nothing actually matters all that much and you can do whatever you want. And most certainly you will do the things you want to do while you procrastinate assuming you avoid Reddit and video games.

Have a look at this: https://stevenpressfield.com/books/the-war-of-art/

Be careful, mental health is really precious...

I didn't have the courage to quit my PhD while I was alone (my supervisors were not involved in my work from the beginning; I had almost no comments on my writings, including my thesis...). It took me 5.5 years (instead of the average 3.5 years in my university) to graduate. I extended my 3-year contract with 2 years of teaching and the remaining 6 months I was without a contract.

I finished my thesis. However, It completely destroyed me: 2 years later I am still severely depressed with severe generalised anxiety disorders.

As someone with first hand experience of this, trust me this is temporary. You will heal from this.

Is it ok to meet with your advisor and discuss closing down the project?

My thoughts are: 1. It seemed like a high potential project 2. Over time you learned the return on investment may not be worth it 3. You need to focus on things that make forward direction in your PHD rather than expending any more time on this project. 4. This project can be shelved and others can take it on if interest returns in the future and/or you complete your PHD and have enough free time to return to it.

I think your advisor would appreciate your growth in this as a learning moment.

Shit. Reading this is like reading my autobiography.

And I don't even fix the problem at the end. I graduated only at the mercy of my advisor who eventually allowed me to defense without a journal publication on hand.

Here is some good advise how to write scientific texts: https://clauswilke.com/virtualbooks/

When you are a team of one, you are basically the team leader to yourself in charge of motivating that team. You usually get that at an office setting so that’s why it gets tough going at it alone. Fixing mental blockers is a good move as that is a huge blocker for you it seems. But don’t wait for the sky to clear to make some moves, do that Vomit writing thing to get you moving inbetween or whatever you can muster by setting very tiny goals. Just keep moving and you’d be surprised one day

When I was writing my thesis I had one rule that kept me going: one page a day. Every day I had to add at least one page to my thesis. It could come from text or charts or a table or the bibliography or wherever, but that page count had to go up every day.

Some days, I added a paragraph that spilled over onto the first line of a new page and that was that. Other days, one page became five became 20 as I hit a rhythm. It was always about giving myself that chance to hit it off for the day.

I did this for awhile until I couldn't even motivate myself to write a single word. Or if I absolutely managed to force myself to write some words, the next day I would edit them back to 0.

Procrastination that stems from negative emotional processes isn't so easily beaten.

It took me a good part of 2020 to write up my PhD thesis. I began writing right when I was hit by a life-threatening depression. I could not make any progress for months while being pressured by my next employer to submit the thesis quickly so I could start the new job. What took me 9 months should really have been 2 or 3. I was able to finish only because one of my best friends was very supportive and had a few calls with me to help me with organising myself.

I did this with basically every project that took longer than a couple of days in university. Somehow I never had the courage to finish stuff, even though the constant feeling of guilt was making me miserable. Every second you don't shut up your brain with a constant stream of information, you begin to think about the stuff you need to do but don't. It's always in the back of your mind. Not a single moment to relax.

Bro, you are not alone. I have similar problems with my master's thesis. Two things help me: - every Sunday I report to my sister on my progress - on the evening she asks me how my paper is going and I honestly answer her even if there is no progress - I try to work on it every weekend. I stopped fooling myself that working on it on working day evenings is even possible with a kid running around. And... There is some progress!

What a waste, the time you have for your thesis is the most free time you will ever have to do research, but if you don't enjoy it whats the point.

I don't know what are PhD studies like in USA, but from my experience I can tell you: go for the small wins. Something that will make you see that some steps are made. I start with small tasks so that I would get momentum. Like that 80-20 rule. To get 80 percent of things done in 20 time. And then when your engine is warmed up then go for the hardest part. Good luck on your endeavors!

Does the author want or need their doctorate? If they don’t, there is nothing shameful about not finishing it.

My mom skipped two grades, was valedictorian of her class in high school, and went to Yale for grad school, and never finished her PhD. She met my dad, wanted to relocate and have kids, and when she was having trouble with her dissertation, decided she didn’t need to finish it.

Simply writing down the steps involved to solve a problem and then breaking the steps into smaller and smaller steps until they are ridiculously simple (as in “pickup the mobile phone” and “call #”) often helps me getting things done when I have way too much on my plate and/or the problems I am facing are too overwhelming.

I wrote my thesis by writing the contents page first and then filling out each chapter and subsection as it came to mind.

Whenever I would get stuck on a problem X I would stick it in the contents list in an appropriate chapter as a subheading called "How to solve X" and plod on from there.

Today I use Scrivener which is great for this kind of non-linear writing.

The mindset that helped me work through my master's thesis, was thinking that I'll do a better job next time. Focus on getting something/anything done in the given timeframe, and stop worrying about quality. Let go of the idea that it must be good quality. Do a better job in the next project, whatever it might be.

It sounds like you are not even trying, really trying. Obviously, you are going to feel guilty and anxious if you don't make any progress, so make at least a little progress, even if it's not the technical part or reading papers to get ideas, instead you taked 1-month vacation. If you hated it, just quit.

I have a similar problem. I have 3 projects that I have done that are 3 finished papers ready to be written. But I can't make progress on any of them. Not sure what to do. One paper is starting to look complete, but I just don't want to write. Where is my help? Am I really supposed to write all the papers alone??

Look up “andy stapleton youtube”, watch some videos, consider whether you want to either

a) make the necessary changes b) call it a day

b can be awesome! One written off year is nothing in the scheme of a life. For future happiness you will need to learn how to hack your own brain to do what you want, but first you just need to forgive yourself to move on.

The trick I developed in my previous job writing investment memos (which are just essays) is to create an increasingly detailed outline until the complete report has suddenly materialized before your eyes, with only the final step of tying together your notes in complete sentences required.

Are there any perfectionists around here that have experience with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)? It sounds like perfectionism-induced procrastination: it's better to give up than to play because playing may mean losing, and the chance of losing is unacceptable.

I can't remember where I got this from but for the last 35 years, my go-to trick for when I don't know what to write has been writing "I don't know what to write and" and then the rest of it just pours out of my mind and onto the sheet/file.

Sweet summer child I know people who procrastinated working on their thesis for almost twenty years.

I know dat feel, bro

FWIW I couldn't get myself to start my writing thesis until I had signed the contract for my postdoc with a solid start date. That was the craziest 10 weeks of my academic life. Nothing like a real deadline to help focus the soul, at least for me

If you procrastinate it means that you are not where you want to be. It means that you don't like what you are doing. Draw your conclusions. Life is short, go do something that, at least, you don't dislike.

More posts https://thoughtsbyaashiq.bearblog.dev/

He's doing everything except actual work. Procrastination is a horrible thing.

Amateur. I think the average for my cohort was 5y…

Good luck, though. It IS worth it.

This happened to me last year as a postdoc, but unfortunately here in Germany I cannot find any therapy. I am on a waiting list but have been for almost a year

One of the things that help about it: talk about it with the people you trust the most. Not like asking them for something specific, just talk about it.

Supervisor could do more to help I think. Help the student break it down into manageable weekly chunks. Not just say “get better at time management”

The supervisor is responding to the BS he's being told. OP isn't telling the supervisor "I have emotional problems that lead me to procrastinate as an avoidance mechanism". He's telling him something like "oh yeah I'm totally making progress with task X you gave me, I just didn't finish it because I went into task Y and made progress there instead".

> Warning: This post is long, depressing and rambling. I've written it for my own benefit.

Post then proceeds to rocket to the top of HN almost immediately

Use chatGPT to build a skeleton of ideas. DO NOT USE anything directly but as a starting point to maybe get you jump started again.

I should have written my CS master's thesis in 2015.

Wrote a book and hundreds of articles since then. Still can't bring myself to do it.

As an aspiring PhD student and procrastinator, this comment section makes me both hopeful and mildly terrified.

Some treacherous advice in the comments. I personally do not consider English literature and journalistic style guides to be applicable to primary scientific and technical literature writing without a diligent amount of scrutiny.

First and foremost, valid work needs to follow basic logical and empirical tenets. This is not easy nor does it come for free, and it is expected from primary scientific literature writers to take their time (or else risk engaging in low-quality work - or worse, pseudoscience).

Second, impactful work needs to easily connect to directly and indirectly adjacent literature. Truly impactful work needs to be relevant, correct, precise but understandable, comparable, reproducible and extendable, all in connection to related work. This is not easy nor does it come for free, and it is expected from writers to constantly check literature at every step before continuing (or else risk building on fragile ground - or worse, doing something that already exists).

Last, on doing something that already exists, novel work needs to not reinvent the many systems and subsystems it encompasses. Truly novel work needs a humble understanding of unknown unknowns. This comes at a hefty price of extensive learning and reading which is neither easy nor free.

Writing should be deferred to the consolidation of each incremental step related to primary scientific work.

Not writing should not be understood as procrastination of the scientific endeavor unless the work does not concern easing or putting you closer to steps' objectives.

My personal advice:

It is fine to reach blockers in scientific work. Other people certainly have reached similar blockers and not given up. Other people have also reached blockers and proposed alternative approaches. Work on: structuring ways to attack problems; attacking simpler or scaled-down versions of problems and formally classifying each version; mapping all different ways simpler problems can be modelled and attacked; strategizing how to reintroduce simplifications or scale; building solid foundations, sharing subproblems with colleagues or deferring certain knowledges outside the scope to the literature.

It is also fine to consider other lines of research if blockers are indeed unmanageable. Understand how the problem can be applied in other settings and consider pivoting to one particular setting. Understand as well that scientific work is not personal and you should not take inabilities as personal defeats.

Contributing knowledge to the scientific literature is hard, tiresome, and takes time and patience.

You want to run the distance, not sprint. You also want to make it to the end, not compete.

The only way out is through.

It was true for me in the '80s, it's still true now.

Just finish the bloody thing.

Ha! No problem. Almost three years for me at this point ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

... and now I'm making blog posts about it.

Mental Note. Do not spend time writing a comment.

(Good luck OP)

Use ChatGPT to solve the blank page problem.

Are you doing thesis on procrastinating?

I've been here before. I did manage to get my PhD. It wasn't easy and I'm so happy the author is getting therapy because I needed it too. But I don't think the underlying cause is procrastination. At least it wasn't for me.

It was perfectionism.

And because I'm a perfectionist, I even managed to absorb the "nobody's perfect" message while still trying to be perfect, and that's part of the problem. For me, the issue arose when "tasks [took] longer than anticipated" and I started to beat myself up for it. But every massive project that's worthwhile has those issues. Time estimating is difficult especially within research. But taking it personally that we couldn't avoid the estimation problem that so many others have failed at, especially since a PhD thesis is typically the first project of it's scale for an individual, is a recipe for disaster.

I got so burnt out by my PhD project that I literally stared at a blank screen for more than a week trying to force myself to do anything. But I managed with my therapist's help to get out of the death spiral. How did I get out of it? Two simple but difficult objectives.

Self forgiveness and accepting it's going to be shit.

I'll explain the acceptance part first despite that I think people should practice forgiveness first. There's a meme I can't find for book authors that shows a cross-stitch with a beautiful image marked "what the reader sees" and then it's flipped to reveal the mess of thread on the back and marked "what the author sees." Everyone is their own worst critic, so consider that massive issues might only be rough edges and the core of the thesis is likely inact and you need to share it with the world.

The second part is self forgiveness. You did not waste the student's time or resources with a slow project. Every project is over budget and behind schedule. And yes, mistakes were made, but everyone makes mistakes, especially on PhD theses. We used to have a joke amongst the other graduate students "you know, I'll get this right on my next PhD." It's literally everyone's first time.

So, know you're not alone. I walked this path as well. Take a true week long break, and when you come back, form a plan to do a one-week long task. Then take two weeks to do that task. Practice self forgiveness on that task itself. Then formulate the most bare-bones plan for the rest of the PhD. One very silly thing that helped break me out of my death spiral was I started to panic that I couldn't even come up with a title for my thesis. So, I did the word vomit approach others mentioned. It wound up being really really bad because it was kinda sing-songy with unintentional rhyming words. I kept it that way for three months as a joke until I did come up with real final title.

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