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

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!

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 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 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?").

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.