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

171–180 of 275 posts

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

#171

Post by ghaff »

bubblethink wrote: post #33
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 works well for writing. Writing, though, comes at a later stage after you've done at least some of the actual work (code, experiments, whatever). It's the work that people have most trouble with. The ideal trajectory is something like MVP -> write -> iterate. People usually get stuck in the MVP phase. I don't have a good solution to this, except that at least from personal experience, prolonged procrastination i…

Yeah. I'm not a particular vomit draft or mindmap or whatever proponent for writing. But the original post seems to be more about actually doing the lab work for the thesis that's a prerequisite to writing something.

That was where I was with my undergrad thesis. There were dependencies on other work in the lab which wasn't progressing quickly and I just had a lot of trouble getting to the point where I had something to write about. The writing wasn't the big deal.

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

#172

Post by engineer_22 »

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…

Then have ChatGPT do the editing :)

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

#175

Post by lordswork »

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 the past, and could definitely use it right now for writing some documentation that I am procrastinating on indefinitely. Thanks for the tip. This has been helpful. Not sure if I should actually post this, it's not really contributing much to the conversation, but this is an anonymous account of mine, so who cares. Timer is up.

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

#176

Post by jll29 »

bluenose69 wrote: post #122

I am a bit confused about the problem. Most of the comments are about getting past a writing block, but my (possibly incorrect) interpretation was that the sticking point is in doing the research work that would be reported on in the thesis. I infer this partly because of the discussion of bringing undergraduate students and other graduate students into the research team. Obviously, such a team has nothing to do with…

I agree with the parent.

When I read the original poster's story, I felt this smells of poor supervision. A sympathetic supervisor might be a compassionate/"nice" person, but still a poor manager: he should have immediately objected to set up a monster team of students; it's hard to succeed in teams of professionals, but students' goals are not aligned with your own, so they bound to walk away eventually. Nobody can blame them for prioritizing their exams. That's why there are Research Programmers.

What I conjecture might have gone wrong is nobody helped the OP to divide the original project idea into manageable chunks of work that lead to sub-results that lead to smallest publishable units. A Ph.D. thesis is a marathon, not a sprint, and you need to plan accordingly, with milestones every now and then so that the supervisor (and his funders!) can be fed interim results in the form of publications. These milestones also motivate yourself, and they de-risk your project, so that at the end, your thesis can be produced by (slightly simplifying here but only slightly):

  cat paper1.tex paper2.tex ... paper3.tex | pdflatex > phd-thesis.pdf
Think about what sub-questions your overall research question can be split into? What code do you need to write and what experiments do you need to run to support your "central thesis" (which one poster in the above writing advice rightly recommended should be formulated as a question with sub-questions)? In the papers I read about procastrination, the reason commonly given is being overwhelmed by a huge monolithic problem. The good news, then, is: you as a computer science know "divide and conquer" the technique that is the cure for monolithic disease - create little chunks that you can solve, publish, and use as building blocks. Each of them won't be scary. It follows that a finite sequence of non-scary steps won't be scary.

Ask experienced researchers around you for help in dividing up your research into manageable, implementable, publishable chunks. Remember: A Ph.D. thesis is an argument that your "central thesis" holds, so think hard what you need to show and how you can decompose bigger items into sub-questions. I wish you success, and most of all, stay sane!

I know you can do it, because I read your very well articulated post, and problem analysis is 90% of the solution, you also seem to know how to ask for help when you get stuck.

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

#177

Post by telesilla »

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…

Also known as "write drunk, edit sober" * - where your choice of drunk may be defined as 'producing text unsuitable for others to read in that form'.

* Hemingway may have coined this term, along with "make sure you are 100% offline because the Internet never forgets".

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

#178

Post by SecurityNoob »

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…

I find that I get stuck in an endless loop of trying to make something perfect and it massively slows me down. I can spend hours changing a paragraph a million times… it’s extremely frustrating!

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

#179

Post by glial »

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 feel you. I've been there. It took me 9 years to finish. For several years, every Friday I was more depressed because I'd gotten nothing done that week.

To be honest, the only things that helped me were:

(1) stopping taking SSRIs. This was a big one for me. I didn't realize until afterwards what effect they had on the particular type of motivation that a PhD thesis requires.

(2) letting go, a bit, of my original thesis topic. I let my mind wander during a home improvement project and it led to an interesting question that was related but not identical to the original.

One thing I would say is -- don't beat yourself up about it being hard. A PhD is famously hard, and can be exponentially harder depending on your topic and advisor.

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

#180

Post by mproud »

Does the author want or need their doctorate? If they don’t, there is nothing shameful about not finishing it.

My mom skipped two grades, was valedictorian of her class in high school, and went to Yale for grad school, and never finished her PhD. She met my dad, wanted to relocate and have kids, and when she was having trouble with her dissertation, decided she didn’t need to finish it.

Post reply on HN