It's amazing what kind of epic projects a thesis can motivate you to take on (rather than your thesis).
I balanced a consulting job and my PhD, so thesis time was incredibly productive. When I didn’t want to do one, I’d become very productive on the other, and when I got tired of that, I’d switch and get very productive again.
> ``. . . anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment." -- Robert Benchley, in Chips off the Old Benchley, 1949
I learnt to solve the Rubik's cube (actually the Rubik's revenge, the 4x4x4 variant) during the last month of my undergraduate thesis...
For some reason the last “x4” confused me but then I remembered the z-axis. Then it had me thinking how a 4x4x3 Rubik’s Rectangular Cuboid would work. It can’t be turned 90 degrees on one axis. Anyway, for the next time you have a thesis to avoid, maybe.
Thinking about it, i suppose what i actually did to avoid working on my thesis (and pay the bills) was get a part-time programming job, and then that job became full-time, and i never finished the thesis. So, in a sense, fifteen years later, i am still procrastinating.
When I was trying to avoid working on my thesis I wrote FreeBSD Update and bsdiff.
That’s one incredible flex. If only I could have half your productivity while procrastinating.
To be fair, I wasn't just procrastinating from writing; I was also dealing with being diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. I semi-officially took a retroactive leave of absence for a term (I was a bit behind schedule, mentioned the medical issue as having contributed to delays, and the head of the department said "we could say that you had a leave of absence but I don't want to bother with the paperwork if you don't want to").
I did spend at least 1-2 weeks at the beginning of my thesis solely tweaking the typography. ;)
Doesn't everyone spend a couple weeks figuring out their latex template?
And "cleaning up the bibliography" as well...
I spent a good couple of weeks writing some Perl and TeX macros to handle noweb forward-references for my 3rd year Uni project report.
except those who write in Word and then spend the last 2 days before the deadline trying to recover lost footnotes