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

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

#191

Post by yonz »

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 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.

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

#192

Post by Octokiddie »

> 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?

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

#193

Post by Balgair »

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…

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.

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

#194

Post by sirwhinesalot »

frob wrote: post #189

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.…

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.

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

#195

Post by wittjeff »

lordswork wrote: post #175
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…

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 th…

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

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

#196

Post by SamBam »

yonz wrote: post #190
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 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!

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

#197

Post by iamflimflam1 »

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…

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.

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

#198

Post by skrebbel »

lordswork wrote: post #175
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…

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 th…

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.

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

#199

Post by iamflimflam1 »

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

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

#200

Post by contr-error »

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…

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

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