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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

#261

Post by annie_muss »

winter_blue wrote: post #54
annie_muss wrote: post #12

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'…

> 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.

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

#262

Post by annie_muss »

Fr0styMatt88 wrote: post #260
ttul wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 functio…

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.

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

#263

Post by cca778 »

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…

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.

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

#264

Post by ttul »

annie_muss wrote: post #262
Fr0styMatt88 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

#265

Post by hungryforcodes »

SamBam wrote: post #166
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.

> 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…

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!

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

#266

Post by hungryforcodes »

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??

Beaches...bikinis...martinis.

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

#267

Post by hungryforcodes »

philsnow wrote: post #216
MaxPengwing wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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....

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

#268

Post by agumonkey »

scrappyjoe wrote: post #21
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 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'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.

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

#269

Post by Schroedingers2c »

lioeters wrote: post #248
Schroedingers2c wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

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

#270

Post by pas »

afr0ck wrote: post #134
croisillon wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 procr…

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!

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