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

If you&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;s about something being better than nothing, creating momentum, and also avoids being too critical because you literally can not stop and make edits to old work.<p>Remember the only rule is keep typing. Even if it means typing random nonsense for awhile.<p>I do all that but I sometimes make it even more extreme. I make it the goal to produce truly terrible version of the the thing I&#x27;m trying to make. Full of cliches and tropes in writing. Amateur coding mistakes if it&#x27;s a technical project. Not just bad but legit so awful that I would truly embarrassed if somebody else saw it. Like literally, what would so shoddy I&#x27;d be afraid to have someone look at my screen right now. I mean literally ask yourself what work is so bad you would be humiliated if your advisor saw it. Make that your goal.<p>But it still works. After you have <i>something</i> even it&#x27;s an abomination, it gets your brain thinking about it and working on it, and it&#x27;s so much easier to make the obvious improvements, and then more, and eventually you are just doing things normally.

Hey, I&#x27;m the author of this blog post. I didn&#x27;t think anyone would even read it, let alone post it on HN. To be honest it&#x27;s a little scary how many people are seeing this post since it&#x27;s basically my 2am anxiety-fueled cry for help. But it&#x27;s also motivating reading all these comments from people who&#x27;ve had similar experiences and are offering encouragement. I&#x27;m reading every one of your replies and they&#x27;re giving me the confidence that I can be better and do better.

Here&#x27;s my thesis procrastination story:<p>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&#x27;t come close to sticking to the plan. I fiddled around with a few things but didn&#x27;t really do anything.<p>Fast forward to a week before the deadline. I a few broken prototypes and no very little else of the 10,000 word thesis I was supposed to hand in at the end of the week. I finally broke down in front of my professor. In the end I sat around the corner from his office all week as he checked on me every hour or so to make sure I was writing it. I took breaks to go cry in the toilet. I just barely managed to finish it and hand it in on time. I cried again, this time tears of joy and relief.<p>What really stands out to me, apart from the heroic push at the end, is that in the back of my mind I <i>knew</i> I was going to procrastinate on this project and even that knowledge wasn&#x27;t enough to stop me. The planning, organization, calendars, todo lists and so on didn&#x27;t help.<p>Later in life I was diagnosed with ADHD. With medication and coping techniques things are getting better.<p>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.<p>For anyone struggling with procrastination I wish you all the best. It is a lifelong problem. Don&#x27;t expect to be able to solve it over night, but it can get better.

A question to the community:<p>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 &quot;research is quite different to doing an undergrad degree&quot;. 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 do, these are milestones that are average&#x2F;good to have at these times within your PhD, these are examples of people having done a great PhD, and so on.<p>If your supervisor is a bit hands-off then you&#x27;re kind of thrown into a job&#x2F;position and are just expected to figure out what you should do or how it works. I find this odd and very inefficient. Especially in view of how little a fresh graduate student knows.<p>Anyone else finding this weird? Is it similar or different in industry&#x2F;non-academic jobs?

When it got to the writing-up stage of my PhD (social sciences) I tried to avoid procrastination by setting myself a target of 500 words a day. I figured that if a thesis was 100K words, knocking out 500 a day would get me there in less than a year. I put a few extra rules in place (they needed to be &#x27;good&#x27; words, edited, revised and not just enough to hit the word target) but once I hit that target I felt like I had made progress towards the larger goal - even if just a little bit.<p>Daily targets became sections, sections became chapters, and eventually I had my thesis. Had I not worked to this sort of structure I am sure that I would have put it off one more day, one more week...and never got there even if the research was done.

This is not procrastination. This is what I would call a common phenomena of lack of consequences. With no feedback loop, the author has little impetus to complete the work.<p>An in-law lost their house 20 years ago, their mom took them in and they haven’t worked a day in their life. They have learned that doing nothing is a winning strategy.<p>My son had severe school problems during Covid because everyone was socially promoted. He got a B while not learning anything, because there was no negative consequence to not studying (and we tried to stay on top of this but grades and assignments were not tracked anywhere). We had to get him to private school and six months of difficult times catching up to his grade level.<p>Most of us need feedback to improve ourselves. There are a precious few who can complete things through sheer force of will. But most of us, I posit, need real world feedback (both good and bad) to live by.<p>In the case of the author, trying to put this the nicest possible way, they seem to have spent 12 months in advanced studies not doing the work. The blame should not be entirely on them for this, the school and advisor should have escalating consequences for failing to push forward.

I recommend you three books, because as academic I expect you to like thinking:<p><pre><code> 1. The now habit. Understand what anxiety and procrastination is. Where does your anxiety comes from? You probably are comparing yourself with what you should be doing, or with what you should have done in the perfect world. There is no perfect world. You were the &quot;planner&quot;, the strategist, but someone else did the dirty job, the boring stuff. A good planner will usually become a terrible action man, because it requires a completely different mindset. Action or execution requires totally different strategies from managing-planning. First, it requires no planning, no time spent planning and deciding because it has already been decided. People that are good strategists usually are people that love to think all the time, hence it becomes natural to them. Now, if they need to execute something that has been decided(even by themselves!!) they continue expending time and effort looking for a better solution, for a better plan and the law of diminishing returns kicks in. As planners they could spend 100% on it, be specialists, but now it is a terrible strategy. </code></pre> You need to be able to be two personas in one. From a person that only cares about planning and making decisions to someone who only cares about what is in front of his or her until the work is done.<p><pre><code> 2. Atomic Habits. Use proven strategies that work. Do not care about results, only care about good habits, because they produce results automatically. 3. The book of no. If you have problems, you state them clearly. We don&#x27;t need another PhD, we don&#x27;t care. Do you care about what you are doing? Nobody forces do to do it, you do it because you want it or else you just don&#x27;t do that.</code></pre>

It’s okay to quit. The academic world has exploitation baked into it so it’s rare for people to be told that directly by those benefiting from your continued participation, but it’s okay to quit. If the thesis is making you this miserable you might not be cut out for research, and that’s okay. There are many other easier and more economically fruitful ways to spend your life.<p>I quit my PhD and it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I came pretty close to killing myself (no exaggeration) during my PhD because of how much shame and humiliation I felt about not succeeding at something for the first time ever in my life. I made regular visits to the rooftop of my lab building at night where I would sit crying and trying to work up the nerve to jump off. If that’s how you’re feeling, just leave. It’s not worth it.<p>If you can find your way into tech you’ll soon be making more than all your professors without having to spend another decade or more going through the hazing process known as the tenure track. The grass is most definitely greener.

&gt; There&#x27;s lots of people in similar situations, and I&#x27;m sure a few of them finally broke out of it.<p>I went through a very similar death spiral as a grad student. Frustration leads to dread leads to slower progress leads to <i>more</i> dread leads to no progress and depression.<p>I wish I had some magic trick to reset my mind in times like that, but I don&#x27;t. I wound up dropping out and went to industry instead... and while the failure stung at the time, it was the best decision I ever made. Academia is a job. If your job is making you miserable, it&#x27;s probably time to move on to another job -- especially if you have marketable skills. For me at least, it was so much easier to reset facing new problems, problems that I didn&#x27;t go to work dreading.<p>My big takeaway was that this <i>is</i> a failure state for me, and that I need to be aware of myself and head it off before I&#x27;m trapped. I need to therapy, coaching, or other help before the death spiral sets in. But breaking <i>out</i> of it and making progress on the hell-project? I dunno, sorry.<p>I&#x27;ll also say that, if you&#x27;re like me, you may have struggled with suicidal thoughts. The thought that kept me sane, prior to leaving, was reminding myself that it would be <i>ridiculous</i> to kill myself over work. Work isn&#x27;t the purpose of living, being at the top of your field isn&#x27;t the purpose of living, even being an academic isn&#x27;t the purpose of living. There&#x27;s billions of people on earth living fulfilling lives with boring, mundane jobs, finding satisfaction in friends and family and hobbies instead... so I would remind myself that, worst come to worst, I&#x27;d go find a boring, mundane job to pay the bills and find my satisfaction elsewhere.

I know this feeling. It took me eight years from when I entered my PhD program until I handed in my thesis. Three of those years I was away from campus working part-time, but I was still trying to do my thesis during those week.<p>It sounds like you are putting too much on yourself. If I can say so from reading the post, it also sounds like you have a bad advisor. Research is HARD. It is by it&#x27;s nature, ambiguous and risky, and it can be very difficult to distinguish &quot;productive failure&quot; from just spinning your wheels. This is what your advisor is here to help you do, and it doesn&#x27;t sound like he is helping you do that.<p>I had a similar advisor and while I thought he was nice for not punishing me when another week went by and I hadn&#x27;t made any progress, he was really just enabling my poor habits. I was always reluctant to switch advisors because I thought I was smart enough to do it on my own, but the sunk-cost fallacy overcame me.<p>Eventually, though, I did take the leap and switch advisors six years in (when I returned from part-time work). My new advisor was great. We both agreed that my goal was not to set the academic world on fire, but to complete my PhD and with her support I completed a thesis I was proud of.<p>One final thing: My story is an uncommon one. Virtually everyone else I knew who &quot;took time off&quot; from grad school never completed their PhD. That&#x27;s ok and I have just as much respect for those who left, because I know how difficult that decision is. It&#x27;s usually the right one, though.

That is not procratination. Procrastinators will avoid a task to verz best end and then do the least minium to get the job somehow done. You avoided and anvoided and then quit. I think this is a personality disorder called (anxiously) avoidant personality disorder. And I am not saying that to label or to fret you but to help. If you know the name and shape of your enemy it is easier to fight it. Please go and talk to a psychiatrist. A behavior therapy can help immensly.

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.<p>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 writing. And, at one point, the author talks of dismissing the others, with an intention of carrying on, alone. These things gave me the idea that the block is not in writing, but rather in completing the pre-writing work. So, the wonderful writing advice -- and I mean that, what I see here is well-informed and heartfelt -- might not be the main thing the author needs.<p>The thesis advisor seems like a very good person, being patient, encouraging, and supportive. I don&#x27;t think too many advisors would go out of their way to employ others to help in a thesis project. A more common approach is to simply cut off funding for the postgraduate student after a certain time, or if insufficient progress were being made. Given these things, it seems to me that the advisor has been a good help to the author.<p>So, what to do? At the most basic, the choices are (a) to carry on or (b) to leave the program. Both choices can be good ones. And <i>making</i> a choice can be the sort of self-empowering step that leads to very good things in life. So, my advice is to make a choice. It can be time-limited, if that helps, e.g. &quot;I&#x27;ll give this another month, and if I&#x27;m not happy, I&#x27;ll leave.&quot; Please note the word <i>happy</i> here. That is very important. Life is short. Life also proceeds in a directed fashion -- you can&#x27;t go back and change something that happened years ago. Make your future be good for you. Hope for -- no, <i>expect</i> -- that you will be happy, and productive, and that you will use all the experiences of your life to find ways to make others happy, and productive.<p>This is all very vague, I admit. But I&#x27;ve seen many students get into a rut that is really quite corrosive to the soul. Making a choice, knowing that it&#x27;s <i>your</i> choice, can be quite freeing. There are many paths in life, many ways to contribute to this world. Don&#x27;t underestimate your ability to find the path that&#x27;s right for you.

This is pretty typical of PhD students that make others work for them (that&#x27;s not what is expected of you, you are not a professor, you are their assistant) and don&#x27;t have good professors to help them learn good leadership practices. They take too big of a task and aren&#x27;t good managers yet and have to deal with a crowd of unreliable workers. Undergrads are notoriously unreliable due to a lack of experience, high confidence and low time flexibility. They often have high course load and finals, must find their next lab and so on. Also as an undergrad when you see your project leader beeing lost, you look for an escape and put your effort in things that will matter more (you very well know that paper will not be written in time) because you know that nothing will get out of this project in a reasonable time frame.<p>My 2 cents if you are stuck in a situation like that, put in a single document everything you have. All the methods you have used, the results. These are easy to put and do not require any creativity. Then you start explaining context, concepts and what you planned and where it could lead. No need to make pages. Make lists. After that everything is about fluffying those lists at your own pace.<p>Writing is almost never a linear endeavor, even more the first time you do it.<p>Whatever happens being you finishing that into your article(s) and dissertation or quitting will at least make sure that nobody worked for nothing.

I spent 7 years procrastinating my master&#x27;s thesis. I&#x27;d been working full time at a regular job, where I could do a project that the university allowed as a valid Master thesis subject. Between the start of the project and eventually finishing, I had 2 kids, learned all there is to know about Bitcoin, and fully renovated a new home.<p>Don&#x27;t beat yourself up about the procrastination, but also don&#x27;t beat yourself up over the lying and deflection that you did. There is a significant number of students going through the same thing. It doesn&#x27;t make you a bad person, or even a very poor student. You just got derailed, and had difficulties getting back on track.<p>To me, it was a very educative experience. I learned a lot about myself and my abilities.

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 <i>every single day</i> you must fight to the death with your own torpor.

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&#x27;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&#x2F;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).<p>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.<p>First went to the uni counsellor and sought therapy&#x2F;help. Requested a refund due to mental health issues (luckily one year granted).<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Started working immediately and paying off my debt. Life started to get better. Moved out of that town after a year and didn&#x27;t step on the campus for the next 7 years.<p>Not sure if there&#x27;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&#x2F;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&#x27;t shoot for the stars and if you&#x27;re high on some achievement one day don&#x27;t let that change the goal of only finishing it.<p>Wishing you the best and rest assured, better days come after this.

I was in same situation, bro ! But mine is Master thesis, to work on very simple Neuron network to recognize numbers.<p>Alright, i was using Matlab at that time, it&#x27;s frustrated topic as i have no clue why things work or didn&#x27;t work.<p>So procastination was what happened.

Memorable, for the last year two years I&#x27;ve been working on identifying structural causes of procrastination caused by working from home and working on a digital device.<p>While I&#x27;m sure there are personality factors that are affecting your productivity, there are a number of factor in play that are beyond your control.<p>I&#x27;ve worked closely with a number of CEO&#x27;s and thesis writers helping them out of the slump.<p>I&#x27;f you DM me, I&#x27;d love to have a call with you to give a number of pointers how to get more productive immediately and also to help you find professional help to ease the possible underlying factors that tend to cause procrastination.

&gt; At this point I&#x27;m seriously considering quitting. I just don&#x27;t have what it takes to earn this degree.<p>I&#x27;m sure you do have what it takes. But theres a difference between having something and using it. I have what it takes to learn Japanese. Am I gonna learn Japanese? No. Because as much as it sounds like a nice idea, there&#x27;s other things I&#x27;d rather do with my time. I want it, but not nearly enough to <i>do</i> it. (although that&#x27;s a bad example, because I could learn it one hour per week and finish it in 10 years. I&#x27;m not starting it because the process is intimidating in a toil-y way rather than a spark-my-creativity way)<p>If you could do only one thing with your life, with no problems for money, time, motivation, etc, what would that be? Go do that. Because no matter how hard it is, it&#x27;s the one thing you want to do with your life. And you only get one life.<p>Before you leave the PhD, what can you do to take advantage of where you are in life right now? Meet more people around you, attend a lecture series, go dancing with fellow classmates, take an art class, join a theater troupe. You don&#x27;t know - maybe you&#x27;ll meet your future wife while you&#x27;re distracting yourself from your PhD, and later this will be the funny story you tell about how you met. Don&#x27;t take it so seriously. Just find something that feels valuable about your current situation, enjoy it, and let go of the guilt.

Did anyone actually bother reading TFA? Most comments are about <i>writing</i> a thesis. But OP is mostly complaining about not making progress in <i>research</i> that will end up in the thesis.<p>OP mentioned of an elephant in the room: not having any progress for the last X months. But there may be a second elephant that has gone unnoticed: OP may have already done enough to formulate and defend a coherent thesis. Or, the missing part isn&#x27;t required to be as grand as the OP had imagined for their latest project, when it started.<p>Many people may have a strong sense of pride and want to finish what they start. But this is really one of the times one needs to push their pride aside and be practical, mostly for the sake of their mental health. I would recommend to anyone in similar position to (a) compare their research output with that of past PhD students in their group, (b) openly discuss with their supervisor the minimum requirements for approving their thesis.<p>Another practicality to keep in mind is that from a professor&#x27;s perspective, a PhD graduate with a less than stellar thesis is preferred over a dropout student. Also, for PhD students interested in pursuing academic career, these days postdoc work is probably more important than a stellar PhD thesis.

I&#x27;m also in the same boat. I&#x27;ve been trying to complete my Bachelor&#x27;s degree since 2011. I&#x27;ve been working on a pre-thesis assignment since 2021.<p>However, I recently found a solution that works for me:<p>I commute to work for one hour every day. In May 2022 I had a car crash and wrecked my car. Not having the money for a new car left me stuck with using the train to get to work. After a few days I was already looking for something useful to do with my daily two hours I spent on trains. It was a hassle, too, because I have to change trains 2-3 times.<p>So, I installed Linux on my laptop and configured it for maximum battery life and, more importantly, making bootup, hibernate and resume as quick as possible.<p>I did that, so I can pull out my laptop even if I&#x27;m just spending 15-10 minutes on one train, and do something with my time.<p>So every day, before and after work, I make a little tiny progress on my thesis. And it quickly became a habit, too. I can&#x27;t avoid it, because I can&#x27;t avoid going to work. And there&#x27;s not much else I could do with that laptop.<p>So, even on days when I don&#x27;t feel like it, I always think: &quot;might as well work on my thesis&quot;<p>It worked so well, I even missed my stop once because I was too focused!

&gt; I don&#x27;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&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;t elaborate.<p>Some have offered advice on the writing aspect (&quot;vomit draft&quot;). Writing doesn&#x27;t appear to be this author&#x27;s problem - it&#x27;s working on the project itself. The author &quot;hates&quot; even thinking about it. No research progress means nothing to write about. Writing more effectively won&#x27;t solve the problem because the problem isn&#x27;t writing.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;s ability to move the project forward.<p>I&#x27;m speculating, but these things tend to follow a similar pattern.<p>I&#x27;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?

I don&#x27;t have any tips to add here other than I feel you and I have dealt with similar feelings when I was doing my uni degree (I haven&#x27;t done a thesis or something similar mainly because I hate writing long form stuff!)<p>I used to procrastinate working on assignments or watching lectures because I was afraid I wouldn&#x27;t understand the content and I&#x27;d fulfill the belief that I was not smart enough to be studying comp sci, which inevitably led to not having enough time to properly study and understand the content or do assignments!<p>But over time it took me a little less time in order for me to get started on that assignment or watch that lecture. You&#x27;re most likely not going to greatly improve your organisation overnight, but as long as you are seeing small bits of progress, that&#x27;s what matters.

After reading the other posts on your blog, I&#x27;m not entirely convinced that procrastination is your real problem. You&#x27;ve already seen a therapist, I think you should continue doing that. And ... if something makes you truly unhappy, don&#x27;t be afraid to let it go.

I&#x27;m not sure the author will ever read this, but I am also a PhD student, have been one for far too long, and in the past have struggled with similar `time management&#x27; issues, though I&#x27;m not sure that&#x27;s really the problem. As time passes, especially when things go wrong, projects and writing become very emotional. Having memories of looking at something a few years ago and looking at it again a few years later to try to resubmit it tends to trigger guilt, anger etc in me. I&#x27;ve found some strategies to help me, because I&#x27;m close to finishing and think the marginal benefit&#x2F;marginal cost makes sense (benefit is large, finish your phd in 2 years, 1 year, 6 months, depends on where you are).<p>One tool I use to help me work even when I&#x27;m not feeling it is Focusmate (google it). I&#x27;ve found that sometimes, working out my issues is useful , but sometimes the emotions are overpowering and no amount of working them out will make me not regret something. That used to make me stop. Nowadays if I use Focusmate, I tend to think less of such `large picture&#x27; issues and instead work on just a little bit, and get a little done. then after a day, a get more done, and so on. I do sometimes get upset and avoid it altogether, but I&#x27;m definitely much better at `time management&#x27; this way. Also, I don&#x27;t want to leave a focusmate in the middle of a session, i just need to stick around 25 minutes, and the feelings can pass and i can even enjoy some of the craft of the specific thing I&#x27;m doing. I hope it helps someone.

Those are rookie numbers. I procrastinated on a research paper for 4 years. My brother now has a nearly finished bachelors thesis for 14 years. Granted, he has more important issues.

This is writers block and is very common, don’t give up.<p>My solution was to stand in my lab for hours with an iPad on a stand and dictate 70 pages of my thesis.<p>It was actually an invigorating experience and you learn a bunch of random Siri&#x2F;dictation syntax to boot.<p>Also, if I were to do it again today, try using chatgpt to write the bulk fluff from some outline concepts. The quality of your thesis doesn’t matter as much as doing the bare minimum to graduate :)

It helps to write down what the real problems are, why it is so difficult now.<p>And then take a step back. Be pragmatic. Maybe some earlier decision was wrong and needs to be changed, to simplify, to remove some of the goals, so that you can realistically finish something in a reasonable time (think about days, max 1-2 weeks), which is useful, and can be shown. Then later you can still extend it, and maybe work on some of the other goals.

It sounds from reading your post that you need to have an honest conversation with your supervisor.<p>And - he needs to be honest with you about what&#x27;s possible from this point onwards.<p>Currently, you are trying to sugar coat the situation and he is too nice to really challenge you. He&#x27;s probably fallen into the &quot;Ruinous Empathy&quot; trap and it&#x27;s damaging you.<p>You need to at least be prepared for the honest answer to be that there is no way forward.<p>Some questions that you both need to answer (I&#x27;m making some assumptions here as I don&#x27;t know what your thesis is about).<p><pre><code> - Do you even know what your thesis is about? - What&#x27;s the question it&#x27;s trying to answer? - What&#x27;s the hypothesis on the answer? - How are&#x2F;were you going to test the hypothesis? - What&#x27;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&#x27;s not feasible to do more, can you add in enough theoretical discussion&#x2F;hand waving to get a thesis out of it</code></pre>

Hey, i know you probably didn&#x27;t expect this to be at the top of HN and there&#x27;s a lot of comments here.<p>But I hear you. I largely feel similar about my PhD (even though I&#x27;m not as far a long). It&#x27;s an isolating experience, but you don&#x27;t have to do it alone. I think it&#x27;s great you are taking steps for your mental health.<p>Also, you don&#x27;t need a PhD to enjoy life.

&gt; And him saying that it&#x27;s okay, to take my time, to be compassionate with myself.<p>Maybe this is part of the issue. In my CS department, when this happens, the advisor has to raise up the problem. Then a concrete solution must be found. For instance, defining concrete steps and deadlines, and possibly stopping the PhD if things really don&#x27;t go forward.<p>A lot of people are subject to procrastination, so it&#x27;s not about blaming and making students feel guilty. But they should be helped, as it&#x27;s not making the student a favour to let the situation drag forever.<p>Personally, I also had months of procrastination during my PhD (and still suffers from procrastination, I think it&#x27;s anxiety related and imposter syndrome). But somehow, I managed to get it done, even though my PhD could have been much better than what it was. I think what helped me most was to have extra tasks to get the ball rolling. For instance, teaching a class: there&#x27;s a well-defined scope and deadline.

I&#x27;ve had similar funks throughout my PhD and thesis-writing experiences. It&#x27;s hard to fish out the mantras that kept me going at those times (though I have backed them up in notes that I will revisit after some distance from the time), but a recurring one was:<p><i>I&#x27;m going to feel like shit whether I do or don&#x27;t do anything, so I might as well do something</i><p>Discussing some issues with friends and&#x2F;or others in your cohort will likely make you feel less alone than browsing other doomposts on r&#x2F;GradSchool.<p>With writing in particular, I&#x27;ve recently felt handwriting to be the limit of my writing production, i.e. given a fixed length of time, my output will be independent of whether I wrote or typed it. The affordance of writing slows me down just enough to craft the same text I would&#x27;ve (re)^(n)typed on computer. Writing is also more expressive and makes it easier to forget about my butt in the chair.

What a crazily vulnerable post, cheers man and hope it gets figured out

The first ~70% of the time I worked on my thesis were reading, taking notes and organizing them. It felt like procrastinating at the time, but after that the thesis basically wrote itself.<p>For all projects where getting going scares the heck out of you I recommend this quote by Franz Kafka:<p>&gt; Beyond a certain point there is no return. This point has to be reached.

It&#x27;s a bit random, but when I went though this, it made me feel better to realise that it&#x27;s a fairly common human experience.<p>In particular, finding that people whose work I admired admitted having similar issues, Douglas Adams for example:<p>&gt; I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.<p>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.<p>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:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abrilliantmind.blog&#x2F;why-do-we-procrastinate-the-elephant-and-the-rider&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;abrilliantmind.blog&#x2F;why-do-we-procrastinate-the-elep...</a>

i procrastinated on my bachelor&#x27;s thesis for ~5 years. the school ended up changing the graduation requirements before i finished it.<p>never underestimate the power of stubbornness.

I think that if you can&#x27;t get yourself to do something for a long time, it&#x27;s because you truly don&#x27;t want to do it but haven&#x27;t admitted it to yourself. Probably you have a strong vision of who you are -- a PhD student, an eventual academic -- and it turns out it&#x27;s in conflict with some other part of your identity, what you actually want to do.<p>You&#x27;ll find instant peace if you admit that you don&#x27;t want to do it and stop feeling like you should. It is fine, actually, to do a thing until you realize you don&#x27;t want to and then change your mind, but it&#x27;s tied up in a bunch of other stuff so it&#x27;s hard to see that clearly.

To start, I find strange that other students were hired to work in his&#x2F;her thesis. I doubt even that this is allowed in some countries.<p>Focusing in minor tasks to be completed in a different working environment could help, but without specific details about the case and the specific knowledge area, we can&#x27;t know if the author is beating a dead horse or not.<p>&quot;I tried X medication&quot; and &quot;I went to therapy&quot; are two big red flags to me. He seems to be looking for a magic solution or somebody else that does the hard work. This is not how thesis work

The problem is your advisor sent you on an unknown journey. A Ph.D. thesis isn&#x27;t a postdoc project. You needed guidance on the journey and course correction but didn&#x27;t receive any.<p>I also went on an unknown journey but the difference was I had a weekly meeting with my advisor and we talked and tried to find a solution. I wrote a few pages in my thesis explaining all our failed approaches. But the difference was my advisor helped me. He saw me working on a dead-end solution and he said it doesn&#x27;t work to find a different solution. After 5 or 6 attempts, we found a solution.<p>PhD advisor is not necessary someone who knows the topic. It&#x27;s someone who teaches you the research and guides you.<p>Don&#x27;t give up.

It might help to seriously look at why you want a PhD and whether you still want it. There&#x27;s no shame in going a different direction (i.e., drop academia for industry), if you find out that you have zero inspiration and it&#x27;s not for you. Success is not measured in either having or not having a PhD. But if it&#x27;s something you desperately want to have because of what will come after your PhD that can only be achieved with one, that can provide motivation to just push through even if you hate it. Either way I wish you success.<p>(PS. Don&#x27;t let sunk cost be your primary motivation for finishing it.)

I did nothing for 18 months when I was writing up. I think the problem was that I wasnt sure what I was supposed to be writing. Instead, get up late, open my thesis document, send emails, go for coffee, go for lunch, read replies, send more emails, go for coffee, websurf and then go to the pub. When I finally figured out what I needed to write, it all came out in 6 weeks. It was no great discovery, just along the lines of: what did you do, why, what&#x27;s the current state of knowledge, what was the outcome, what worked, what didnt, what&#x27;s the contribution, what&#x27;s next.

There seems to be a faint correlation between procrastination and Bear blogs. Here are two different entries from different authors that I&#x27;ve favorited, both because the struggle is real and relatable, and from the immense amount of discussion both sparked. I look forward to seeing the same with this one.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31285969" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31285969</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31426683" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31426683</a><p>Is Bear the new Xanga or something

I directed a short film on scientific models while procrastinating writing my masters thesis.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;dkTncoPqo5Y" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;dkTncoPqo5Y</a><p>I coauthored a series of papers on a rock mechanics experiment while avoiding working on my PhD (which was in computational social science).<p>Procrastination seems to have only demonstrated to me in my life that nothing actually matters all that much and you can do whatever you want. And most certainly you will do the things you want to do while you procrastinate assuming you avoid Reddit and video games.

Have a look at this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stevenpressfield.com&#x2F;books&#x2F;the-war-of-art&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stevenpressfield.com&#x2F;books&#x2F;the-war-of-art&#x2F;</a>

Be careful, mental health is really precious...<p>I didn&#x27;t have the courage to quit my PhD while I was alone (my supervisors were not involved in my work from the beginning; I had almost no comments on my writings, including my thesis...). It took me 5.5 years (instead of the average 3.5 years in my university) to graduate. I extended my 3-year contract with 2 years of teaching and the remaining 6 months I was without a contract.<p>I finished my thesis. However, It completely destroyed me: 2 years later I am still severely depressed with severe generalised anxiety disorders.

Is it ok to meet with your advisor and discuss closing down the project?<p>My thoughts are: 1. It seemed like a high potential project 2. Over time you learned the return on investment may not be worth it 3. You need to focus on things that make forward direction in your PHD rather than expending any more time on this project. 4. This project can be shelved and others can take it on if interest returns in the future and&#x2F;or you complete your PHD and have enough free time to return to it.<p>I think your advisor would appreciate your growth in this as a learning moment.

Shit. Reading this is like reading my autobiography.<p>And I don&#x27;t even fix the problem at the end. I graduated only at the mercy of my advisor who eventually allowed me to defense without a journal publication on hand.

Here is some good advise how to write scientific texts: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;clauswilke.com&#x2F;virtualbooks&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;clauswilke.com&#x2F;virtualbooks&#x2F;</a>

When you are a team of one, you are basically the team leader to yourself in charge of motivating that team. You usually get that at an office setting so that’s why it gets tough going at it alone. Fixing mental blockers is a good move as that is a huge blocker for you it seems. But don’t wait for the sky to clear to make some moves, do that Vomit writing thing to get you moving inbetween or whatever you can muster by setting very tiny goals. Just keep moving and you’d be surprised one day

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.<p>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. It was always about giving myself that chance to hit it off for the day.

It took me a good part of 2020 to write up my PhD thesis. I began writing right when I was hit by a life-threatening depression. I could not make any progress for months while being pressured by my next employer to submit the thesis quickly so I could start the new job. What took me 9 months should really have been 2 or 3. I was able to finish only because one of my best friends was very supportive and had a few calls with me to help me with organising myself.

I did this with basically every project that took longer than a couple of days in university. Somehow I never had the courage to finish stuff, even though the constant feeling of guilt was making me miserable. Every second you don&#x27;t shut up your brain with a constant stream of information, you begin to think about the stuff you need to do but don&#x27;t. It&#x27;s always in the back of your mind. Not a single moment to relax.

Bro, you are not alone. I have similar problems with my master&#x27;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!

What a waste, the time you have for your thesis is the most free time you will ever have to do research, but if you don&#x27;t enjoy it whats the point.

I don&#x27;t know what are PhD studies like in USA, but from my experience I can tell you: go for the small wins. Something that will make you see that some steps are made. I start with small tasks so that I would get momentum. Like that 80-20 rule. To get 80 percent of things done in 20 time. And then when your engine is warmed up then go for the hardest part. Good luck on your endeavors!

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

Simply writing down the steps involved to solve a problem and then breaking the steps into smaller and smaller steps until they are ridiculously simple (as in “pickup the mobile phone” and “call #”) often helps me getting things done when I have way too much on my plate and&#x2F;or the problems I am facing are too overwhelming.

I wrote my thesis by writing the contents page first and then filling out each chapter and subsection as it came to mind.<p>Whenever I would get stuck on a problem X I would stick it in the contents list in an appropriate chapter as a subheading called &quot;How to solve X&quot; and plod on from there.<p>Today I use Scrivener which is great for this kind of non-linear writing.

The mindset that helped me work through my master&#x27;s thesis, was thinking that I&#x27;ll do a better job next time. Focus on getting something&#x2F;anything done in the given timeframe, and stop worrying about quality. Let go of the idea that it must be good quality. Do a better job in the next project, whatever it might be.

It sounds like you are not even trying, really trying. Obviously, you are going to feel guilty and anxious if you don&#x27;t make any progress, so make at least a little progress, even if it&#x27;s not the technical part or reading papers to get ideas, instead you taked 1-month vacation. If you hated it, just quit.

I have a similar problem. I have 3 projects that I have done that are 3 finished papers ready to be written. But I can&#x27;t make progress on any of them. Not sure what to do. One paper is starting to look complete, but I just don&#x27;t want to write. Where is my help? Am I really supposed to write all the papers alone??

Look up “andy stapleton youtube”, watch some videos, consider whether you want to either<p>a) make the necessary changes b) call it a day<p>b can be awesome! One written off year is nothing in the scheme of a life. For future happiness you will need to learn how to hack your own brain to do what you want, but first you just need to forgive yourself to move on.

The trick I developed in my previous job writing investment memos (which are just essays) is to create an increasingly detailed outline until the complete report has suddenly materialized before your eyes, with only the final step of tying together your notes in complete sentences required.

Are there any perfectionists around here that have experience with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)? It sounds like perfectionism-induced procrastination: it&#x27;s better to give up than to play because playing may mean losing, and the chance of losing is unacceptable.

I can&#x27;t remember where I got this from but for the last 35 years, my go-to trick for when I don&#x27;t know what to write has been writing &quot;I don&#x27;t know what to write and&quot; and then the rest of it just pours out of my mind and onto the sheet&#x2F;file.

Sweet summer child I know people who procrastinated working on their thesis for almost twenty years.

I know dat feel, bro

FWIW I couldn&#x27;t get myself to start my writing thesis until I had signed the contract for my postdoc with a solid start date. That was the craziest 10 weeks of my academic life. Nothing like a real deadline to help focus the soul, at least for me

If you procrastinate it means that you are not where you want to be. It means that you don&#x27;t like what you are doing. Draw your conclusions. Life is short, go do something that, at least, you don&#x27;t dislike.

More posts <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thoughtsbyaashiq.bearblog.dev&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thoughtsbyaashiq.bearblog.dev&#x2F;</a><p>He&#x27;s doing everything except actual work. Procrastination is a horrible thing.

Amateur. I think the average for my cohort was 5y…<p>Good luck, though. It IS worth it.

This happened to me last year as a postdoc, but unfortunately here in Germany I cannot find any therapy. I am on a waiting list but have been for almost a year

One of the things that help about it: talk about it with the people you trust the most. Not like asking them for something specific, just talk about it.

Supervisor could do more to help I think. Help the student break it down into manageable weekly chunks. Not just say “get better at time management”

&gt; Warning: This post is long, depressing and rambling. I&#x27;ve written it for my own benefit.<p>Post then proceeds to rocket to the top of HN almost immediately

Use chatGPT to build a skeleton of ideas. DO NOT USE anything directly but as a starting point to maybe get you jump started again.

I should have written my CS master&#x27;s thesis in 2015.<p>Wrote a book and hundreds of articles since then. Still can&#x27;t bring myself to do it.

As an aspiring PhD student and procrastinator, this comment section makes me both hopeful and mildly terrified.

Some treacherous advice in the comments. I personally do not consider English literature and journalistic style guides to be applicable to primary scientific and technical literature writing without a diligent amount of scrutiny.<p>First and foremost, valid work needs to follow basic logical and empirical tenets. This is not easy nor does it come for free, and it is expected from primary scientific literature writers to take their time (or else risk engaging in low-quality work - or worse, pseudoscience).<p>Second, impactful work needs to easily connect to directly and indirectly adjacent literature. Truly impactful work needs to be relevant, correct, precise but understandable, comparable, reproducible and extendable, all in connection to related work. This is not easy nor does it come for free, and it is expected from writers to constantly check literature at every step before continuing (or else risk building on fragile ground - or worse, doing something that already exists).<p>Last, on doing something that already exists, novel work needs to not reinvent the many systems and subsystems it encompasses. Truly novel work needs a humble understanding of unknown unknowns. This comes at a hefty price of extensive learning and reading which is neither easy nor free.<p>Writing should be deferred to the consolidation of each incremental step related to primary scientific work.<p>Not writing should not be understood as procrastination of the scientific endeavor unless the work does not concern easing or putting you closer to steps&#x27; objectives.<p>My personal advice:<p>It is fine to reach blockers in scientific work. Other people certainly have reached similar blockers and not given up. Other people have also reached blockers and proposed alternative approaches. Work on: structuring ways to attack problems; attacking simpler or scaled-down versions of problems and formally classifying each version; mapping all different ways simpler problems can be modelled and attacked; strategizing how to reintroduce simplifications or scale; building solid foundations, sharing subproblems with colleagues or deferring certain knowledges outside the scope to the literature.<p>It is also fine to consider other lines of research if blockers are indeed unmanageable. Understand how the problem can be applied in other settings and consider pivoting to one particular setting. Understand as well that scientific work is not personal and you should not take inabilities as personal defeats.<p>Contributing knowledge to the scientific literature is hard, tiresome, and takes time and patience.<p>You want to run the distance, not sprint. You also want to make it to the end, not compete.

The only way out is through.<p>It was true for me in the &#x27;80s, it&#x27;s still true now.<p>Just finish the bloody thing.

Ha! No problem. Almost three years for me at this point ¯\_(ツ)_&#x2F;¯

... and now I&#x27;m making blog posts about it.

Mental Note. Do not spend time writing a comment.<p>(Good luck OP)

Use ChatGPT to solve the blank page problem.

Are you doing thesis on procrastinating?

I&#x27;ve been here before. I did manage to get my PhD. It wasn&#x27;t easy and I&#x27;m so happy the author is getting therapy because I needed it too. But I don&#x27;t think the underlying cause is procrastination. At least it wasn&#x27;t for me.<p>It was perfectionism.<p>And because I&#x27;m a perfectionist, I even managed to absorb the &quot;nobody&#x27;s perfect&quot; message while still trying to be perfect, and that&#x27;s part of the problem. For me, the issue arose when &quot;tasks [took] longer than anticipated&quot; and I started to beat myself up for it. But every massive project that&#x27;s worthwhile has those issues. Time estimating is difficult especially within research. But taking it personally that we couldn&#x27;t avoid the estimation problem that so many others have failed at, especially since a PhD thesis is typically the first project of it&#x27;s scale for an individual, is a recipe for disaster.<p>I got so burnt out by my PhD project that I literally stared at a blank screen for more than a week trying to force myself to do anything. But I managed with my therapist&#x27;s help to get out of the death spiral. How did I get out of it? Two simple but difficult objectives.<p>Self forgiveness and accepting it&#x27;s going to be shit.<p>I&#x27;ll explain the acceptance part first despite that I think people should practice forgiveness first. There&#x27;s a meme I can&#x27;t find for book authors that shows a cross-stitch with a beautiful image marked &quot;what the reader sees&quot; and then it&#x27;s flipped to reveal the mess of thread on the back and marked &quot;what the author sees.&quot; Everyone is their own worst critic, so consider that massive issues might only be rough edges and the core of the thesis is likely inact and you need to share it with the world.<p>The second part is self forgiveness. You did not waste the student&#x27;s time or resources with a slow project. Every project is over budget and behind schedule. And yes, mistakes were made, but everyone makes mistakes, especially on PhD theses. We used to have a joke amongst the other graduate students &quot;you know, I&#x27;ll get this right on my next PhD.&quot; It&#x27;s literally everyone&#x27;s first time.<p>So, know you&#x27;re not alone. I walked this path as well. Take a true week long break, and when you come back, form a plan to do a one-week long task. Then take two weeks to do that task. Practice self forgiveness on that task itself. Then formulate the most bare-bones plan for the rest of the PhD. One very silly thing that helped break me out of my death spiral was I started to panic that I couldn&#x27;t even come up with a title for my thesis. So, I did the word vomit approach others mentioned. It wound up being really really bad because it was kinda sing-songy with unintentional rhyming words. I kept it that way for three months as a joke until I did come up with real final title.