Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

thoughtsbyaashiq.bearblog.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 275 posts

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

#101

Post by thatsadude »

shikshake wrote: post #27

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…

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!

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

#102

Post by dr_dshiv »

dudus wrote: post #50
dr_dshiv wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”

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

#103

Post by augustk »

theshrike79 wrote: post #48
scrappyjoe wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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).

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

#104

Post by MaxPengwing »

ackbar03 wrote: post #5
hungryforcodes wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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??

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.

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

#105

Post by ZeroGravitas »

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...

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

#106

Post by xvinci »

theshrike79 wrote: post #48
scrappyjoe wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

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

#107

Post by gjhr »

neilv wrote: post #74
KVFinn wrote: post #2

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…

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 t…

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.

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

#108

Post by cf141q5325 »

Schroedingers2c wrote: post #41

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 d…

Its not about efficiency, it is an exam situation.

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

#110

Post by jjgreen »

hungryforcodes wrote: post #3
KVFinn wrote: post #2

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…

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.

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 ...
Post reply on HN