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 too critical because you literally can not stop and make edits to old work.
Remember the only rule is keep typing. Even if it means typing random nonsense for awhile.
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'm trying to make. Full of cliches and tropes in writing. Amateur coding mistakes if it'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'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.
But it still works. After you have something even it's an abomination, it gets your brain thinking about it and working on it, and it's so much easier to make the obvious improvements, and then more, and eventually you are just doing things normally.
I cannot recommend this enough, it's what got me over the finish line after waaay too long, including a year with zero progress writing my thesis, just like the article describes.
Each day, it went the same: sit down, try to write about the work, find some meta problem to occupy myself (like "is this the correct order of topics that I'm planning to write in my outline" or "under which topic does this idea belong") before actually writing about the thing itself, cue an unproductive spiral of research into these distractions. After a couple of hours of not actually doing any progress, drift off into the internet "as a break", and only come back to the thesis for 20-30 minute intervals that are exactly as useless as they sound. Become more and more frustrated, but no more productive, as time goes on.
Vomit drafting suddenly gave me a productive focus. Suddenly it was clear that yes, where I want to put this topic is good enough, or there is this one other place where it makes a lot more sense. No more long internal debates over meta-questions. And I realized that yes, I do have a wide range of knowledge about my specialty, something I'm convinced I was subconsciously blocking on before ("what do I do if I try to write about this topic but realize I'm just too stupid to get it, and was just bluffing all the time?").
This is legendary Simpsons writer John Swartzwelder's technique, too:
Since writing is very hard and rewriting is comparatively easy and rather fun, I always write my scripts all the way through as fast as I can, the first day, if possible, putting in crap jokes and pattern dialogue—“Homer, I don’t want you to do that.” “Then I won’t do it.” Then the next day, when I get up, the script’s been written. It’s lousy, but it’s a script. The hard part is done. It’s like a crappy little elf has snuck into my office and badly done all my work for me, and then left with a tip of his crappy hat. All I have to do from that point on is fix it. So I’ve taken a very hard job, writing, and turned it into an easy one, rewriting, overnight. I advise all writers to do their scripts and other writing this way. And be sure to send me a small royalty every time you do it.
I think this a role tools like ChatGPT will fill: spit out a crappy version of something that humans can edit later. It gets you over the hump of looking at a blank page, but isn't itself a deliverable.
“Homer, I don’t want you to do that.” “Then I won’t do it.”
I'm sure that a back-and-forth with Julie Kavner and Dan Castellaneta doing those exact lines would still give me the biggest side-splitting laugh of 1996.
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.
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.
Vomit draft can be great tool, but there's additional risk in science to keep in mind...
I've heard of a person who advocated this kind of draft, and then did a vomit draft themselves for a research project, with the draft including discussing stand-in results of an experiment that they planned to do.
Their colleague on the project saw the draft, and called out that the experiment had not been done. The writer said that they'd only written the draft to see what the paper might look like, once the experiment was done.
But the person who wrote the vomit draft had a problem doing the experiment...
Then that person submitted the paper anyway, with the vomit draft stand-in experiment results, and the paper got accepted. And without telling the other people on the project.
I understand that the story got a lot worse from there.
The vomit draft wasn't the only problem, but if you see someone vomiting drafts that are effectively scientific fabrication as they stand, I advise being uncomfortable with that, and emphasizing to the writer that this is a more dangerous practice than it might seem.
I think, the problem here stems from making vomit draft a social technique instead of keeping it at a personal level. It is potentially harmful if other people can read it. OP describes it as a personal method and it may work by breaking some psychological issues, like a fear of under-perform or something like. But to do this one need to overcome all fears, to get rid of anxiety, and it needs a safe environment where you can write anything. Literally anything, to try it and to show to your mind that it is harmless thing, nothing bad happens, it is ok to write not good enough, because you can dump it later.
I think the problem here is that they submitted a fabrication. If someone is prepared to do that, I don't think how they drafted the document is really the issue.
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.
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 say to myself "I'm a horrible father because I could have spent today with my kids."
It's true that procrastination eats away hours of our lives, but there's no reality where most of us would have been able to say "I know I'll procrastinate the next three days, I'll take a beach vacation with those hours instead, and then do the job promptly the next day."
This kind of (common) thinking is no better than any other kinds of regrets in life, staying awake and thinking "what if I had asked that person out in high school?" etc etc.
Heh, I met a chap doing a PhD in maths at a decent university in Northern England (no names), he was in his 8th year: He was funded for the first 3 years, managed to get another year of funding when that ended and subsequently lived off his parents. By year 6 they were a bit sick of this and stopped, so he had no money for rent so started to live in the department, working until late in the evening and then sleeping in a cupboard. He'd been doing that for 2 years when I met him. Perhaps he's still there ...
This is definitely good advice for fleshing out the actual writing, I used this ontop of to the paragraph planning. So you build out a mindmap style plan with part > chapter > section > sub-section > sub-sub-section / figures / tables > couple words for a paragraph. Then you manage everything at the lowest level, you work out how many paragraphs you need by when. You pick paragraphs at random even if you dont have the results or good stuff to say you write the vomit draft of that paragraph. Then you pick just one thats already written and edit it. Repeat until you run out of time. It's the only way I managed to finish my thesis. The other thing I did was always do a writing warm up, so just something free flowing off the top of your head but still a bit technical. Maybe some instructions on how to make a cup of tea for an alien in low gravity. Without a plan though you can't validate you can actually finish, which is insanely important for motivation. You need the concept of % progress and time left. Also you need to know you've done enough work to actually write a thesis or if you need to do more work, and what work you actually need. The definition here is also a paragraph is about 3-5 sentences, a sentence being around 10 words. It is extremely hard to fail to write 50 words. That sense of failing to write is the mind killer. After a session even if that session lasts 20 minutes and you only wrote 50 words you update the spreadsheet showing vomit to edit progress. Until I did all this my progress was almost nothing.
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 is an indication that you don't like the work. And this can be difficult to acknowledge because maybe you liked it earlier, or thought that you did. And then ego becomes involved. Knowing what you like and don't like can also be quite tricky. Sometimes, the only real solution is to quit and do something else.
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.
You know, I'm fairly sure that there is more than just procrastination at play. This feels like some human mal-adaptation where we do anything (or nothing) to avoid dealing with That One Terrible Thing, whatever it may be.
Throughout my career I've had this feeling or state of thinking multiple times, whether I had to work with legacy code, uncooperative individuals, or just a week ago, work with a bad DB schema and write complex queries against it.
In my case, procrastination was just a consequence of wanting to do something but I very clearly also remember just sitting and staring at the task at hand, doing absolutely nothing, because I couldn't stomach how bad everything about the task that needed to be done was - bunches of redundant tables, illogical linking of data, lots of overcomplication, no documentation and no examples of helpful queries whatsoever.
> 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.
In the end, just forcing myself to get started, writing out the dozen of different things I needed as a part of the query and then working backwards through everything, was what worked. It took hours of uninterrupted work, I felt miserable throughout it, but I got things done in the end, all because of that decision to actually work on it and deal with the pain and suffering, very much how someone would need to make the leap to dive into legacy code, or an issue for a project that doesn't have monitoring or instrumentation, or writing a thesis.
I think that's why techniques like Pomodoro also get recommended, because if you trick yourself into saying that you'll only do a bit of suffering (work on the horrible thing) now and will take a break later, it's more tolerable: https://todoist.com/productivity-methods/pomodoro-technique
I'm just writing this because to me it feels different from how people commonly view procrastination: just getting distracted and wanting dopamine, as opposed to being able to stare at the computer for an hour without doing anything, just because doing the thing would be horrible. The latter feeling makes you want to quit your academical program (which seems like what the author is dealing with a little bit), or maybe draft your resignation and leave the job market for a bit instead of dealing with the codebase or whatever (which I did, albeit for different and less negative reasons in my case).
I'm also experiencing this currently. I can sit in front of my thesis and stare into the screen for a whole good day. I also can distract myself with a smartphone but that's merely a distraction from the boredom.
Around the topic of procrastination, I read "doing the thing would be horrible" for the first time and it just rings so true.
Doing this thing (this kind of work) feels horrible and I know I'll need to do it for many, many more days and weeks and these will all be horrible. There's no way around it. I often subconsciously try to make this time less horrible by experimenting with listening to music, have the TV running in the background or other things. This never really works. Or I just haven't found what I need.
At the end, whenever I do get a good chunk of work done, I feel really good about it. But I also acknowledge that it was horrible and I need rest now. And some dread builds up, reinforcing that the work is indeed horrible and the next chunk will require me to go through it again. The good feeling of getting work done does absolutely nothing to knowing that the work is horrible while you are doing it. It's the type of work (writing, editing) that I detest, not so much the content/topic.
I have no idea what strategy can help here (I welcome suggestions!).
Strategies such as Pomodoro do not help me. A 5min break doesn't change that the work is horrible and I'll be doing countless Pomodoros throughout the days/weeks anyway. The amount of horrible work is not reduced and the little breaks don't make it less horrible, so it doesn't help me.
What works for me sometimes is tricking me a bit. Just change this one sentences here and... this one also looks really bad... and when I'm at it, this figure there could use an overhaul... and suddenly you are working on your thesis. Key point here is - I think - that you don't go at it with the intention of doing actual work (which you know is horrible). You just change this stupid sentence there because your inner perfectionist wants you to. Thinking about it like that, the horribleness associated with the work may be a state of mind I can work on. No idea how to though.
Tangentially, this is where I see a ton of potential in these new ML tools like ChatGPT. If you're expecting it to produce finished work, you'll often be disappointed, but if it can even produce a bad version of what you need, the time saved could be enormous.
Having written 3 dissertations, a bunch of research papers and writing code daily, I'm a huge fan of this method. Sometimes I just create bullet points stating "here i need to talk about this and that" adding a bit of actual information whenever it comes to mind. If I have to write a piece of code that I really don't feel like, i use a mix of comments and meta-code.
The procrastinators among us have now an excellent way to turn their "vomit drafts" into a full fledged document. GPT-3 is able to transform bullet points into something that you can call a draft. I'm still not sure if that's a good or bad thing.
This is going to sound ridiculous but I’m serious: if you can’t even type a whole bunch of stuff, type just a basic (terrible) outline and then feed it to chatgpt to expand on.
The output will be laughably bad, most likely, but you’ll know why it’s bad and you can fix the obvious mistakes and then go from there.
> 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'm trying to make.
You know, I've read and heard all sorts of advice on writing, and this is the first time I've seen this, and I think it's brilliant. Undergrad me absolutely should have done this, 'cause the perfectionism I grew up with took a long time to unlearn.
Do you have an opinion on getting drunk during the process to lower inhibition? Not a thing I've ever tried, but I've definitely heard of people doing it.
ADHD happens to correlate with a higher rate of addiction, substance abuse.
I would not recommend getting drunk as a tool for getting things done. The problem is it might work. And if it does, you don't want to make a habit of reaching for that tool whenever you find yourself procrastinating. That way lies aforementioned statistics.
I had a struggling Lit friend in college who I kept tabs on. She was a late adopter to blogging but she talked a lot about how writers find the motivation to write. It was an early part of my long process of discovering that everyone, everywhere is struggling with the same problems, we just call them by different names to feel special. Writers have tricks that are fundamentally Refactoring, possibly before we had a name for it.
I'm not a Hemingway fan, I don't enjoy his writing and I have the impression that he was a terrible human being, but his advice to other writers is apparently pretty good:
> Quit [for the day] when you know what happens next.
If you want to set yourself up for failure tomorrow, write until you're completely out of ideas today, then go do something else. In the morning, you'll dread going back to the piece because what do you have to say? Anything? Who knows. Maybe you've written everything good you'll ever write. Maybe you're a failure. Maybe sitting down at the typewriter/keyboard will prove your mother was right and you should have become a doctor. So much pressure. I'll go do something else and pretend everything is fine. Or I'll read about the writing process and hope that serves as sharpening my saw while I wait for magic.
When you stop with one item on your TODO list, you have at least one idea left, and having slept, you're more likely to pull on that thread and find two other things you want to write as well. You just have to get started and the creativity will happen. Starting is the hard part. Starting is what kills you before you've even tried.
It works for other things as well. I needed to create a „customer portal“ web application for a product I’m working on, and kept postponing it, because I don’t enjoy working on it. The pressure to have it functional became so great that I literally committed a generic dashboard template with just a couple text changes, truly ugly, vomit-style stuff. But it helped me overcome my blockade and start working on it in earnest (and actually enjoying it!).
First time I heard about this. And I think I really really like it.
I have a huge writers block for anything I'm good or within my specialized field, it's kind of strange. Especially for scientific work this is extra bad, not being able to write, no matter how much time I dedicate to it.
I'll take this approach to heart next time, thanks. I think this is right up my alley, including the funny name for it.
There's something there, corroborated by two examples in cinema and litterature: Finding Forrester (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zLBEFvMkQCo) and in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, with the rhetorics professor facing 'my students are stuck write even the simplest essay' problem.
Yes, write something, anything, then edit. These are two different states of mind, two completely different personality parts, and I wish we taught the first one better (and the second one too...). Shut down the critics part when writing. Should down the ego part when editing.
> my goto strategy is similar to what writers call a vomit draft
A "vomit draft" might be good approach to a writer's block. But I think the blog describes a burnout. You probably need actual help to recover from a burnout.
One thing that works for me is to just start writing figure legends. That seems easy, it doesn't feel like "writing the paper". I end up basically writing the results section for that figure or table, so I just cut and paste most of it to the actual results later, and keep a summarized version for the actual figure legend.
By coincidence, I'm trying to submit a PhD thesis today (Genetics/Computational Biology).
That's great advice. I do something similar with art. I draw 100 poor sketches/drawings that are meant to be really bad and then eventually the good idea pops out without trying.
I think this has something to do with avoiding triggering your amygdala, because once the stress sets in you get a fight or flight reaction and then creativity gets completely shut down. Dance around the amygdala and you'll be creating cool stuff.
I do a similar thing when I’m writing. Except I write on paper and allow myself to make revisions. Being on paper is pretty self limiting as far as edit spirals.
The other trick is when you are stuck instead of writing garbage write down why you are stuck and describe what would go there if you weren’t stuck. Sometimes this gets you to the solution, but if it doesn’t you still have your thoughts on it for latter.
I do something similar. There even used to be a lovely website that had a text entry box which would delete words if you didn’t keep up a certain words per minute. It sounds daft but it was actually useful to use at least a couple of times to train yourself to keep writing, even if it was garbage.
I think now I might be tempted to use dictation to reduce barriers ti getting words down even more.
"There’s one solution that each and every book on writer’s block offers: write five words. Any five words. Follow this advice, Mr. Ashbery, and you’ll never have writer’s block again."
(From "Uncreative writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age" by conceptual poet and "word processor" Kenneth Goldsmith)
Edit: Oh, this historical paper is slightly different angle, but also relevant, helped me quite a bit:
I'd like to try this, but it's tougher when you're collaborating on a shared document.
For example, I collaborate on papers that always start out as a shared Overleaf doc. When I'm starting a new section, I just want to toss some ideas down on the page, knowing that the prose is terrible. I can really enjoy this phase if I know it's free of judgment. However, it's so much harder when I know that someone might open the doc in an hour and judge my writing before I get to edit it - or worse, if I see that they've opened the page while I'm in the middle of it, or god forbid see their cursor click around near where I'm typing. It's a lot harder to concentrate until they leave or start editing somewhere else. I end up taking a while to write each paragraph, planning & editing as I go.
So write it locally in an unshared document and paste it into overleaf when you want someone else to see it? I don't like overleaf to begin with, but to feel this tied to it is a bit wild.
Amazing advice. This technique is what got my PhD thesis across the line.
Word vomit and just concatenating together all my current work into a single LaTeX project. Once it existed as a single document and I could start to “see” it as a thesis, even though most of the writing was terrible, the momentum was there.
Currently writing my MS thesis. "Concat all my existing work into a doc" was my initial move as well, and I discovered I had written a little on almost every topic already. In some cases, had written lots.
That let me move to outlining and shuffling things around almost immediately, making writing about filling gaps instead of staring at a page. That in turn let me evolve my writing along with the codebase; now, in late January, I'm well ahead of schedule on written material (knocks on wood)
I'm a musician & amateur home producer, and this extreme approach of yours is exactly what I recommend to people (and what I do myself) to overcome the feeling of "I can't get started because what I start on sounds bad and I have an overwhelming fear of making something that sounds bad." Turning it on its head by purposefully trying to make the cliched, trite, and generally whack song I can, can be immensely freeing.
When I wrote my Master thesis, my vomit draft was written on paper with pen. Safe to say it was horrendous and even full of rant and swearing. Yet ultimately I managed to write much more words than directly on LaTex.
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!
The problem often is fighting the urge to correct things. For me the only thing that helped was sleep deprivation, but probably alcohol has a similar effect.
I would love this to be turned into a text editor. You set up a target, e.g. 20K chars and start typing away. No formatting, no distractions. The program always just shows the current line, or even just the 10 characters, while previous lines fade out into black with no way to reveal them. Only after hitting the target is the entire text revealed.
Optionally with some reward animation/sound after every target/10 characters.
I used a somewhat similar technique after I got stuck in my PhD for more than a year: I sat down and wrote a chapter explaining why my research was doomed, because XY could not be properly measured and quantified etc. It turned out that once I had my concerns spelled out on paper instead of tossing them around in my head, proceeding to the actual measuring and quantifying was anything but impossible.
This works wonders, especially for collaborative documents (which a thesis should be, a collaboration between you and your supervisor/other people). A first "vomit" draft allows you to at least discuss the concepts, and it forces you to align the thoughts in your head. It is how I have written all my papers/thesis, and I cannot recommended it enough!
This might be dangerous advice, but consider interactively using a language model in writing "vomit draft". I tried copilot recently, and even though some of what it suggests is "no, no, NO!"-material, it really helps. I hadn't known how much simple writing block - struggling to write the easy parts - kept me back.
I took a similar approach with my thesis, I used voice typing while writing my first draft. The other approach I use in combination is writing every heading and subheading to create a document outline, then fill the gaps. The power of these approaches are breaking down the work into smaller manageable chunks.
You have my curiosity. I am trying to isolate what would make this work.
1) Do backspaces count towards corrections?
2) Would you say this also applies to coding?
3) What seems to be implied is, that this generates something I feel lends itself to "obvious improvements" instead of just throwing away and starting over. Your thoughts?
Yes! Hard approach to take for a perfectionist but it’s the only way that works for me too. GitHub receipts for latest project show a lot of regressions. Embarrassing. But better than nothing, and finally got the MVP done. It was your approach that made it possible.
You don't even have to type. Text to speech is fine for this and the barrier to getting started is nil. Make a rough outline of what you want to cover and have at it.
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 the confidence that I can be better and do better.
I finished my PhD with more than one year delay from the "normal" time because I also spent basically 2 years playing video games and not doing shit. Today I'm an associate professor with a nice job and good salary... so yeah, you can survive it! :)
But seriously though, let me try to give you a couple of advices: first of all, the idea that you need to work on a project that gets you excited to get up from the bed in the morning is wrong and dangerous. Work is work and PhD is also work, just a bit different from the rest. So yeah you project is still work, so forget about being excited to get up in the morning. Trust me, you will survive even if you are not excited to get up in the morning! It's just work.
Second thing, you made a mistake, which was to involve a million people in your project before you started. You built too much pressure for the results, and that pressure made you scared and killed your motivation to work on it. It's normal to sell the fish before you catch it in academia, but to do that in a healthy and efficient way you need lots of experience (like, decades of it, and being a professor with a stable career so you can take the punch and still stand up). Now that you're back to basics, it'll be easier. Start by making it worth it to you. Work for a few hours a day, like maybe two or three, then go do something you like after that. Soon you will realize that doing the stuff you like after you work a few hours is MUCH more enjoyable than procrastinating (it really, objectively, is). So you'll train your brain to get the reward from the work: hey, if I work for two hours, I can then do X or Y which will be awesome. (Do not plan to work 8 hours a day. You won't).
Third, remember that you (as in, you, a person, a living being) are more important than all of this. It's just work; it doesn't deserve all the attention it gets. So what if there are a few people disappointed with you here and there? You are also disappointed with some people and that doesn't make them go home and cry in the dark. In all probability, there will always be a few people disappointed with you for the rest of your life. Actually, the list will probably grow. :)
Great advice. Personally I think this applies to many long term ambitious, and ambiguous projects, not just a PHD. I had to learn this the hardway as well and now I really enjoy my work in a sustainable way.
As a new PhD student trying to figure out a routine and framework for studies/work, this comment was incredibly helpful! Thanks for writing it out. Bookmarked.
I took more than 3 years to write up my thesis. It was the most depressed I have ever been. There are many good comments here and I hope they motivate you.
The advice that worked for me came from a professor in the depart (who was not my supervisor) which was essentially:
- Make sure your thesis title is framed as a question
- Each chapter should be a subquestion to the general overarching question
- Start each chapter by asking the explicit subquestion
- Conclude each chapter by summarising the answer to the subquestion and asking the subquestion of the next chapter.
In this way you have an overarching narrative to your thesis - without actually writing it.
Next add the headings and subheading of how you answered each subquestion (I image this will be cutting and pasting what have already written). You can breakdown subheading until each section only requires one or two paragraphs. Then start writing one paragraph at at a time. Do not worry about word count until you have finished a first draft. The narrative will make it much easier to read, understand and finish. You may need to get creative about how the narrative will flow so it makes sense - but you can ask for help with this.
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 her to pull the plug and it's been the best decision in years. Five years seem incredibly long for no result retrospectively, but what can one do.
A lot of the young people in these swamps are in a bad place.
The university I attended many years ago almost didn't have that swamp for Master's students. It was largely attributed to students working in small teams thus pulling each other through.
I learned about this when I attended an evaluation group with some of the high-ranking staff members on the faculty. At some universities, most people end up in the swamp and have for decades if not centuries. Unfortunately, it's shameful, so people don't hear about it, and little changes.
If you work as staff at a university with a big swamp, the one single biggest contribution you can do to society is probably help fix the system at that university so people don't fall into the swamp. Even if it means putting your research on hold.
I never finished my 4th year Honours thesis. It was just a point in my life where so much was changing - moving out of home, getting my first full-time job, etc. I already had my Bachelor's degree and life just.... out-ran it I guess.
Looking back now I feel a little bad but I honestly don't regret it. You kind of look back a decade later (it's been much longer than that by now, but I realized this a long while ago) and it just seems insignificant, like a past life. It doesn't actually matter in a sense any more, nobody cares about my degree.
It was a wonderful, formative experience at the time and I don't for a second regret doing it. It's just that life moves on and people change over the years, ESPECIALLY if they started university as young adults. I actually think there should be a hard limit on the time you can spend doing a Masters given what I've heard about them. Or at least there should be more sanely-spaced deliverables. I was lucky in a way that Hons. was only one extra year on my degree, so there was no swamp to fall into at least. I wasn't going to pay for another year and by that time I didn't want to do it anymore.
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 procrastinating for years for such a useless thing.
My master thesis, which is supposed to take 8 months, took me 2 years and 4 months.
Every morning I would wake up and think 'today is the day I will do good work!'. And every night I would go to bed and feel terrible and like a failure because no, I did not write or even read a single line. In hindside, I was definitely depressed during these days. I wish someone had told me I needed to get help for my mental health.
I only 'snapped out of it' because of how the student loan system in my country works, and there was a huge financial incentive to finish it before a certain date.
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 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 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.
I procrastinated on my thesis. I got the usual advice: 'perfect is the enemy of the good', 'just get it written' etc. but it made no difference. With hindsight I now realize that I was working on an unfeasible project with inadequate preparation but did not want to accept that. How do other experienced people, not just your advisor, react to your project? If they are skeptical it may be a worth taking a cold hard look at the entire plan.
I was at your position. I dragged on a journal and my thesis for 2 years. My advisor literally begged me to get my dissertation done at times. He complained I was a perfectionist and told me all good advice you have here every month for those two years. It didn't work.
Eventually, he told me "How about you ``take leave`` and write whatever and bring it to me". I took one week leave, stayed at home and start writing. Somehow, I finished my first thesis draft in a month after that then I graduated. Those two years was the lowest years in my life emotionally.
I don't have any advice for you because every person is different. This is a battle you need to fight by yourself. Start writing!
My dad, who is a professor, used to say "Don't get it right, get it written!".
I would always feel there was more I had to research before I properly started. I missed the deadline for my MSc dissertation and had to start again. In fact, the act of writing it changed my thoughts and led me down more productive paths in the end.
Know at least in part what you're going through. Submitted by crap draft of my PhD thesis in 2003 and then spent 4 years in full time non-academic employment doing the huge list of revisions in my spare time and commuting on a train!
You're doing all the right things - getting help, seeking therapy (I wish I had done earlier), being fair to yourself.
It might be helpful to try the following:
Remind yourself why you started the PhD. Look back before you accepted. Might help to talk to friends about this. Why did you accept the challenge? What about yourself meant that you had to do it? Everyone's ignorant of what it entails until after completion and every PhD is different but why did you start at all? Reminding yourself of how brave you were to begin with is important.
Next thing is to divide and conquer. Find the smallest, easiest task of all. It might be insignificant to the final work but it's something. For me it was a paper I had been putting off reading. I decided to code one small piece of it. Not the whole thing, not a reproduction of the results, not beautiful code, just something. For me, that broke the spell.
Finally, accept that it's OK to walk away. Like everyone else here, I believe you can do it - I can feel it from your blog post. That said, it's OK if you don't complete it. Yes, there will be regret but you'll go on to other, brighter things, unshackled and free. That's OK too. You don't have to complete everything you start, that wouldn't be fair to you. I know a good few that didn't complete for a myriad of reasons and they're all doing great. I think you should give it a go but the world won't end if you don't.
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.
I've been having trouble writing my PhD manuscript for more than one year, so the title clearly resonated with me :)
I'm nearly done, I've been doing regular meetings with my advisor and keeping track of progress to help me write. At some point, I guess I realized that any progress is progress, that the thesis isn't going to write itself, and that I don't have to hand over a perfect work.
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.
For a different phase .. if you find your way beyond the current(?) association between the work and an understandable repulsive toxicity experience .. this brief inspirational vid may help with the hard slog needed to finish:
There's one thing I couldn't find in your post: do you WANT to finish this PhD?
Also, have you talked to your advisor about this procrastination problem, your fears, and the possibility of quitting? He sounds like an approachable person.
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.
Also, if you haven't seen it before, read this seminal procrastination post by Wait But Why[1].
Of course it's just a theory, but one that clicked for me and many others. It gives some helpful names to many of the things you experience when procrastinating. Afterwards you'll be able to recognize, "oh, I'm in the dark playground again" and possibly be able to do something about it.
It actually went really well! It was sort of an informal review of my progress as a researcher in 2022, so it was a great opportunity for me to be straight up about my faults throughout the year. I spent a lot of time before the meeting thinking about where I went wrong, why I did what I did and how I will be trying to improve myself in the coming months (writing this post really helped with that process). Coming in with all that thinking made the conversation more honest and productive. I'm a lot more excited and motivated about pushing forward my projects once I drive back to college this weekend.
I'm also lucky to have a super understanding advisor who is invested in my personal growth.
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't really do anything.
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.
What really stands out to me, apart from the heroic push at the end, is that in the back of my mind I knew I was going to procrastinate on this project and even that knowledge wasn't enough to stop me. The planning, organization, calendars, todo lists and so on didn't help.
Later in life I was diagnosed with ADHD. With medication and coping techniques things are getting better.
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.
For anyone struggling with procrastination I wish you all the best. It is a lifelong problem. Don't expect to be able to solve it over night, but it can get better.
>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.
Exactly correct. If you're already in a PhD program, well-meaning organizational and motivational techniques are likely not what you need.
What can be labeled as procrastination may be an emotional dysregulation or as Dr. Jen Wolkin calls is " procrastination isn't laziness, it's a trauma response"
To anyone who has felt this way, I am so sorry and you are not alone and there is help. If you're in school, access student health and the graduate programs health resources and leave programs. There still is so much unnecessary stigma and shame around mental health, but if you had similarly severe physical health problem, getting treatment and help would the first step. Not trying to brute force your way through it.
I've been reading some books recently around taking notes and distraction. The most salient part of the book Indistractable is how distraction is primarily a pain management problem.
The relevant chapter starts with
> But after digesting the scientific literature, I had to face the fact that the motivation for diversion originates within us. As is the case with all human behavior, distraction is just another way our brains attempt to deal with pain. If we accept this fact, it makes sense that the only way to handle distraction is by learning to handle discomfort.
If distraction costs us time, then time management is pain management.
Which I felt was a decent stab at the heart of the issue.
> 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?
what ultimately works is asking for help, accepting that yes, it might not be what you want, but it gets you through this hurdle. maybe the next one will be easier. and get up to speed and then work on doing it alone, and then work on doing your best.
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.
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 functioning of highly intelligent people, so the disorder can be diagnosed in this group. A population-based birth cohort study of over 5700 children found no significant differences among children with high, average, or low IQ and ADHD in median age at which ADHD criteria were met, rates of learning disorders, psychiatric disorders, and substance abuse, and rates of stimulant treatment (Katusic et al., 2011; Rommelse et al., 2017).”
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 do, these are milestones that are average/good to have at these times within your PhD, these are examples of people having done a great PhD, and so on.
If your supervisor is a bit hands-off then you're kind of thrown into a job/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.
Anyone else finding this weird? Is it similar or different in industry/non-academic jobs?
I can only speak for CS academia and industry. It is very different in the industry.
In my industry jobs, there is a lot of structure. New grads are often given very close direction and very specific tasks to complete for at least 3-6 months. Then over the next 1-2 years what's expected from you becomes less and less clear, gradually, until you can function somewhat independently. A new grad complaining to a skip that they were not given clear tasks was a Major Fail for their manager/TL. Your manager/TL is required to do this for a new grad, or they were dinged.
In my academic life, you had about as much structure as your advisor provided. About half the advisors did have a plan and genuinely cared. The other half just expected their students to figure it out. It's the students of the former that "succeeded" - i.e. went on to do novel meaningful research. The rest either muddled through till something clicked, or quit. A new student couldn't complain to anyone. There was no structure beyond your advisor. Your entire future is basically in the hands of one person.
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.
I think the problem is that most students think a PhD is just like studying a bit more, but that's not what it's meant to be. It's largely a multi-year solo project with some support, and it should set you up to become an independent researcher.
Part of the problem is that most "university" studies, especially US colleges, are too similar to high school with rigid schedules and teachers closely leading classes throughout the semester. Other models where students are more responsible for organizing and completing their studies foster building independence at an earlier stage already.
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 'good' 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.
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 actually how you get anything properly done in regards to your brain chemistry (according to current knowledge). Reaching goalposts consistently propagates the drive to continue.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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 "planner", 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.
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.
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't need another PhD, we don'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't do that.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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 too critical because you literally can not stop and make edits to old work.
Remember the only rule is keep typing. Even if it means typing random nonsense for awhile.
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'm trying to make. Full of cliches and tropes in writing. Amateur coding mistakes if it'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'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.
But it still works. After you have something even it's an abomination, it gets your brain thinking about it and working on it, and it's so much easier to make the obvious improvements, and then more, and eventually you are just doing things normally.
Each day, it went the same: sit down, try to write about the work, find some meta problem to occupy myself (like "is this the correct order of topics that I'm planning to write in my outline" or "under which topic does this idea belong") before actually writing about the thing itself, cue an unproductive spiral of research into these distractions. After a couple of hours of not actually doing any progress, drift off into the internet "as a break", and only come back to the thesis for 20-30 minute intervals that are exactly as useless as they sound. Become more and more frustrated, but no more productive, as time goes on.
Vomit drafting suddenly gave me a productive focus. Suddenly it was clear that yes, where I want to put this topic is good enough, or there is this one other place where it makes a lot more sense. No more long internal debates over meta-questions. And I realized that yes, I do have a wide range of knowledge about my specialty, something I'm convinced I was subconsciously blocking on before ("what do I do if I try to write about this topic but realize I'm just too stupid to get it, and was just bluffing all the time?").
Since writing is very hard and rewriting is comparatively easy and rather fun, I always write my scripts all the way through as fast as I can, the first day, if possible, putting in crap jokes and pattern dialogue—“Homer, I don’t want you to do that.” “Then I won’t do it.” Then the next day, when I get up, the script’s been written. It’s lousy, but it’s a script. The hard part is done. It’s like a crappy little elf has snuck into my office and badly done all my work for me, and then left with a tip of his crappy hat. All I have to do from that point on is fix it. So I’ve taken a very hard job, writing, and turned it into an easy one, rewriting, overnight. I advise all writers to do their scripts and other writing this way. And be sure to send me a small royalty every time you do it.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/j...
I'm sure that a back-and-forth with Julie Kavner and Dan Castellaneta doing those exact lines would still give me the biggest side-splitting laugh of 1996.
The MVP can be a complete spaghetti piece of crap, just make it work. When it works, you can iterate on making it elegant.
Oh, and if you work for a Corporation, don't tell them it's done when the crappy MVP finally works. You're still "working on it" if they ask.
Otherwise the spaghetti crap will end up in production.
I've heard of a person who advocated this kind of draft, and then did a vomit draft themselves for a research project, with the draft including discussing stand-in results of an experiment that they planned to do.
Their colleague on the project saw the draft, and called out that the experiment had not been done. The writer said that they'd only written the draft to see what the paper might look like, once the experiment was done.
But the person who wrote the vomit draft had a problem doing the experiment...
Then that person submitted the paper anyway, with the vomit draft stand-in experiment results, and the paper got accepted. And without telling the other people on the project.
I understand that the story got a lot worse from there.
The vomit draft wasn't the only problem, but if you see someone vomiting drafts that are effectively scientific fabrication as they stand, I advise being uncomfortable with that, and emphasizing to the writer that this is a more dangerous practice than it might seem.
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 say to myself "I'm a horrible father because I could have spent today with my kids."
It's true that procrastination eats away hours of our lives, but there's no reality where most of us would have been able to say "I know I'll procrastinate the next three days, I'll take a beach vacation with those hours instead, and then do the job promptly the next day."
This kind of (common) thinking is no better than any other kinds of regrets in life, staying awake and thinking "what if I had asked that person out in high school?" etc etc.
I don't have a good solution to this, except that at least from personal experience, prolonged procrastination is an indication that you don't like the work. And this can be difficult to acknowledge because maybe you liked it earlier, or thought that you did. And then ego becomes involved. Knowing what you like and don't like can also be quite tricky. Sometimes, the only real solution is to quit and do something else.
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.
Throughout my career I've had this feeling or state of thinking multiple times, whether I had to work with legacy code, uncooperative individuals, or just a week ago, work with a bad DB schema and write complex queries against it.
In my case, procrastination was just a consequence of wanting to do something but I very clearly also remember just sitting and staring at the task at hand, doing absolutely nothing, because I couldn't stomach how bad everything about the task that needed to be done was - bunches of redundant tables, illogical linking of data, lots of overcomplication, no documentation and no examples of helpful queries whatsoever.
> 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.
In the end, just forcing myself to get started, writing out the dozen of different things I needed as a part of the query and then working backwards through everything, was what worked. It took hours of uninterrupted work, I felt miserable throughout it, but I got things done in the end, all because of that decision to actually work on it and deal with the pain and suffering, very much how someone would need to make the leap to dive into legacy code, or an issue for a project that doesn't have monitoring or instrumentation, or writing a thesis.
I think that's why techniques like Pomodoro also get recommended, because if you trick yourself into saying that you'll only do a bit of suffering (work on the horrible thing) now and will take a break later, it's more tolerable: https://todoist.com/productivity-methods/pomodoro-technique
I'm just writing this because to me it feels different from how people commonly view procrastination: just getting distracted and wanting dopamine, as opposed to being able to stare at the computer for an hour without doing anything, just because doing the thing would be horrible. The latter feeling makes you want to quit your academical program (which seems like what the author is dealing with a little bit), or maybe draft your resignation and leave the job market for a bit instead of dealing with the codebase or whatever (which I did, albeit for different and less negative reasons in my case).
Doing this thing (this kind of work) feels horrible and I know I'll need to do it for many, many more days and weeks and these will all be horrible. There's no way around it. I often subconsciously try to make this time less horrible by experimenting with listening to music, have the TV running in the background or other things. This never really works. Or I just haven't found what I need.
At the end, whenever I do get a good chunk of work done, I feel really good about it. But I also acknowledge that it was horrible and I need rest now. And some dread builds up, reinforcing that the work is indeed horrible and the next chunk will require me to go through it again. The good feeling of getting work done does absolutely nothing to knowing that the work is horrible while you are doing it. It's the type of work (writing, editing) that I detest, not so much the content/topic.
I have no idea what strategy can help here (I welcome suggestions!). Strategies such as Pomodoro do not help me. A 5min break doesn't change that the work is horrible and I'll be doing countless Pomodoros throughout the days/weeks anyway. The amount of horrible work is not reduced and the little breaks don't make it less horrible, so it doesn't help me.
What works for me sometimes is tricking me a bit. Just change this one sentences here and... this one also looks really bad... and when I'm at it, this figure there could use an overhaul... and suddenly you are working on your thesis. Key point here is - I think - that you don't go at it with the intention of doing actual work (which you know is horrible). You just change this stupid sentence there because your inner perfectionist wants you to. Thinking about it like that, the horribleness associated with the work may be a state of mind I can work on. No idea how to though.
Correcting something is much easier than coming up with it.
The procrastinators among us have now an excellent way to turn their "vomit drafts" into a full fledged document. GPT-3 is able to transform bullet points into something that you can call a draft. I'm still not sure if that's a good or bad thing.
However, I worry on both the plagiarism and correctness fronts. When you aren't writing it by hand, it might be easy to miss both.
The output will be laughably bad, most likely, but you’ll know why it’s bad and you can fix the obvious mistakes and then go from there.
You know, I've read and heard all sorts of advice on writing, and this is the first time I've seen this, and I think it's brilliant. Undergrad me absolutely should have done this, 'cause the perfectionism I grew up with took a long time to unlearn.
Do you have an opinion on getting drunk during the process to lower inhibition? Not a thing I've ever tried, but I've definitely heard of people doing it.
I would not recommend getting drunk as a tool for getting things done. The problem is it might work. And if it does, you don't want to make a habit of reaching for that tool whenever you find yourself procrastinating. That way lies aforementioned statistics.
I'm not a Hemingway fan, I don't enjoy his writing and I have the impression that he was a terrible human being, but his advice to other writers is apparently pretty good:
> Quit [for the day] when you know what happens next.
If you want to set yourself up for failure tomorrow, write until you're completely out of ideas today, then go do something else. In the morning, you'll dread going back to the piece because what do you have to say? Anything? Who knows. Maybe you've written everything good you'll ever write. Maybe you're a failure. Maybe sitting down at the typewriter/keyboard will prove your mother was right and you should have become a doctor. So much pressure. I'll go do something else and pretend everything is fine. Or I'll read about the writing process and hope that serves as sharpening my saw while I wait for magic.
When you stop with one item on your TODO list, you have at least one idea left, and having slept, you're more likely to pull on that thread and find two other things you want to write as well. You just have to get started and the creativity will happen. Starting is the hard part. Starting is what kills you before you've even tried.
I have a huge writers block for anything I'm good or within my specialized field, it's kind of strange. Especially for scientific work this is extra bad, not being able to write, no matter how much time I dedicate to it.
I'll take this approach to heart next time, thanks. I think this is right up my alley, including the funny name for it.
Yes, write something, anything, then edit. These are two different states of mind, two completely different personality parts, and I wish we taught the first one better (and the second one too...). Shut down the critics part when writing. Should down the ego part when editing.
A "vomit draft" might be good approach to a writer's block. But I think the blog describes a burnout. You probably need actual help to recover from a burnout.
I think this has something to do with avoiding triggering your amygdala, because once the stress sets in you get a fight or flight reaction and then creativity gets completely shut down. Dance around the amygdala and you'll be creating cool stuff.
The other trick is when you are stuck instead of writing garbage write down why you are stuck and describe what would go there if you weren’t stuck. Sometimes this gets you to the solution, but if it doesn’t you still have your thoughts on it for latter.
(From "Uncreative writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age" by conceptual poet and "word processor" Kenneth Goldsmith)
Edit: Oh, this historical paper is slightly different angle, but also relevant, helped me quite a bit:
Upper, Dennis. "The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of “writer's block”." Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis 7.3 (1974): 497. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1311997/pdf/jab...
For example, I collaborate on papers that always start out as a shared Overleaf doc. When I'm starting a new section, I just want to toss some ideas down on the page, knowing that the prose is terrible. I can really enjoy this phase if I know it's free of judgment. However, it's so much harder when I know that someone might open the doc in an hour and judge my writing before I get to edit it - or worse, if I see that they've opened the page while I'm in the middle of it, or god forbid see their cursor click around near where I'm typing. It's a lot harder to concentrate until they leave or start editing somewhere else. I end up taking a while to write each paragraph, planning & editing as I go.
Word vomit and just concatenating together all my current work into a single LaTeX project. Once it existed as a single document and I could start to “see” it as a thesis, even though most of the writing was terrible, the momentum was there.
That let me move to outlining and shuffling things around almost immediately, making writing about filling gaps instead of staring at a page. That in turn let me evolve my writing along with the codebase; now, in late January, I'm well ahead of schedule on written material (knocks on wood)
* Hemingway may have coined this term, along with "make sure you are 100% offline because the Internet never forgets".
I'm a musician & amateur home producer, and this extreme approach of yours is exactly what I recommend to people (and what I do myself) to overcome the feeling of "I can't get started because what I start on sounds bad and I have an overwhelming fear of making something that sounds bad." Turning it on its head by purposefully trying to make the cliched, trite, and generally whack song I can, can be immensely freeing.
The problem often is fighting the urge to correct things. For me the only thing that helped was sleep deprivation, but probably alcohol has a similar effect.
Optionally with some reward animation/sound after every target/10 characters.
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1) Do backspaces count towards corrections?
2) Would you say this also applies to coding?
3) What seems to be implied is, that this generates something I feel lends itself to "obvious improvements" instead of just throwing away and starting over. Your thoughts?
It deletes all your work if you don't keep typing. Good motivator.
A thing in the world may well be the worst possible example of that thing that can exist. Yet it exists, so has a couple of key properties:
1) it does something (albeit poorly), not nothing
2) it can be improved upon.
"You what? You walked in there, wrote "I AM A fish" four hundred times, did a funny little dance and fainted!"
- Red Dwarf
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But seriously though, let me try to give you a couple of advices: first of all, the idea that you need to work on a project that gets you excited to get up from the bed in the morning is wrong and dangerous. Work is work and PhD is also work, just a bit different from the rest. So yeah you project is still work, so forget about being excited to get up in the morning. Trust me, you will survive even if you are not excited to get up in the morning! It's just work.
Second thing, you made a mistake, which was to involve a million people in your project before you started. You built too much pressure for the results, and that pressure made you scared and killed your motivation to work on it. It's normal to sell the fish before you catch it in academia, but to do that in a healthy and efficient way you need lots of experience (like, decades of it, and being a professor with a stable career so you can take the punch and still stand up). Now that you're back to basics, it'll be easier. Start by making it worth it to you. Work for a few hours a day, like maybe two or three, then go do something you like after that. Soon you will realize that doing the stuff you like after you work a few hours is MUCH more enjoyable than procrastinating (it really, objectively, is). So you'll train your brain to get the reward from the work: hey, if I work for two hours, I can then do X or Y which will be awesome. (Do not plan to work 8 hours a day. You won't).
Third, remember that you (as in, you, a person, a living being) are more important than all of this. It's just work; it doesn't deserve all the attention it gets. So what if there are a few people disappointed with you here and there? You are also disappointed with some people and that doesn't make them go home and cry in the dark. In all probability, there will always be a few people disappointed with you for the rest of your life. Actually, the list will probably grow. :)
Good luck!
The advice that worked for me came from a professor in the depart (who was not my supervisor) which was essentially: - Make sure your thesis title is framed as a question - Each chapter should be a subquestion to the general overarching question - Start each chapter by asking the explicit subquestion - Conclude each chapter by summarising the answer to the subquestion and asking the subquestion of the next chapter.
In this way you have an overarching narrative to your thesis - without actually writing it.
Next add the headings and subheading of how you answered each subquestion (I image this will be cutting and pasting what have already written). You can breakdown subheading until each section only requires one or two paragraphs. Then start writing one paragraph at at a time. Do not worry about word count until you have finished a first draft. The narrative will make it much easier to read, understand and finish. You may need to get creative about how the narrative will flow so it makes sense - but you can ask for help with this.
Hope this helps.
Everything will be alright, take care.
A lot of the young people in these swamps are in a bad place.
The university I attended many years ago almost didn't have that swamp for Master's students. It was largely attributed to students working in small teams thus pulling each other through.
I learned about this when I attended an evaluation group with some of the high-ranking staff members on the faculty. At some universities, most people end up in the swamp and have for decades if not centuries. Unfortunately, it's shameful, so people don't hear about it, and little changes.
If you work as staff at a university with a big swamp, the one single biggest contribution you can do to society is probably help fix the system at that university so people don't fall into the swamp. Even if it means putting your research on hold.
Looking back now I feel a little bad but I honestly don't regret it. You kind of look back a decade later (it's been much longer than that by now, but I realized this a long while ago) and it just seems insignificant, like a past life. It doesn't actually matter in a sense any more, nobody cares about my degree.
It was a wonderful, formative experience at the time and I don't for a second regret doing it. It's just that life moves on and people change over the years, ESPECIALLY if they started university as young adults. I actually think there should be a hard limit on the time you can spend doing a Masters given what I've heard about them. Or at least there should be more sanely-spaced deliverables. I was lucky in a way that Hons. was only one extra year on my degree, so there was no swamp to fall into at least. I wasn't going to pay for another year and by that time I didn't want to do it anymore.
Every morning I would wake up and think 'today is the day I will do good work!'. And every night I would go to bed and feel terrible and like a failure because no, I did not write or even read a single line. In hindside, I was definitely depressed during these days. I wish someone had told me I needed to get help for my mental health.
I only 'snapped out of it' because of how the student loan system in my country works, and there was a huge financial incentive to finish it before a certain date.
I also haven't figured it out yet.
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.
Eventually, he told me "How about you ``take leave`` and write whatever and bring it to me". I took one week leave, stayed at home and start writing. Somehow, I finished my first thesis draft in a month after that then I graduated. Those two years was the lowest years in my life emotionally.
I don't have any advice for you because every person is different. This is a battle you need to fight by yourself. Start writing!
I would always feel there was more I had to research before I properly started. I missed the deadline for my MSc dissertation and had to start again. In fact, the act of writing it changed my thoughts and led me down more productive paths in the end.
You're doing all the right things - getting help, seeking therapy (I wish I had done earlier), being fair to yourself.
It might be helpful to try the following: Remind yourself why you started the PhD. Look back before you accepted. Might help to talk to friends about this. Why did you accept the challenge? What about yourself meant that you had to do it? Everyone's ignorant of what it entails until after completion and every PhD is different but why did you start at all? Reminding yourself of how brave you were to begin with is important.
Next thing is to divide and conquer. Find the smallest, easiest task of all. It might be insignificant to the final work but it's something. For me it was a paper I had been putting off reading. I decided to code one small piece of it. Not the whole thing, not a reproduction of the results, not beautiful code, just something. For me, that broke the spell.
Finally, accept that it's OK to walk away. Like everyone else here, I believe you can do it - I can feel it from your blog post. That said, it's OK if you don't complete it. Yes, there will be regret but you'll go on to other, brighter things, unshackled and free. That's OK too. You don't have to complete everything you start, that wouldn't be fair to you. I know a good few that didn't complete for a myriad of reasons and they're all doing great. I think you should give it a go but the world won't end if you don't.
Best of luck, will be thinking of you today.
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.
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.
I'm nearly done, I've been doing regular meetings with my advisor and keeping track of progress to help me write. At some point, I guess I realized that any progress is progress, that the thesis isn't going to write itself, and that I don't have to hand over a perfect work.
I wish you all the courage to do the same!
First is a 100% anti natural work to do, only using your mind.
Lots of people forget the basics like eating well, resting well, or doing exercise.
For me for example, having a routine of exercise was essential, because your job does not require exercise, like most jobs did 100 years ago.
https://youtu.be/KxGRhd_iWuE
<3, stranger
Also, have you talked to your advisor about this procrastination problem, your fears, and the possibility of quitting? He sounds like an approachable person.
[0] https://www.beeminder.com/home
Of course it's just a theory, but one that clicked for me and many others. It gives some helpful names to many of the things you experience when procrastinating. Afterwards you'll be able to recognize, "oh, I'm in the dark playground again" and possibly be able to do something about it.
[1] https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrasti...
I appreciated the post.
I'm also lucky to have a super understanding advisor who is invested in my personal growth.
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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't really do anything.
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.
What really stands out to me, apart from the heroic push at the end, is that in the back of my mind I knew I was going to procrastinate on this project and even that knowledge wasn't enough to stop me. The planning, organization, calendars, todo lists and so on didn't help.
Later in life I was diagnosed with ADHD. With medication and coping techniques things are getting better.
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.
For anyone struggling with procrastination I wish you all the best. It is a lifelong problem. Don't expect to be able to solve it over night, but it can get better.
Exactly correct. If you're already in a PhD program, well-meaning organizational and motivational techniques are likely not what you need.
What can be labeled as procrastination may be an emotional dysregulation or as Dr. Jen Wolkin calls is " procrastination isn't laziness, it's a trauma response"
https://twitter.com/drjenwolkin/status/1574795724419653636?s...
To anyone who has felt this way, I am so sorry and you are not alone and there is help. If you're in school, access student health and the graduate programs health resources and leave programs. There still is so much unnecessary stigma and shame around mental health, but if you had similarly severe physical health problem, getting treatment and help would the first step. Not trying to brute force your way through it.
The relevant chapter starts with
> But after digesting the scientific literature, I had to face the fact that the motivation for diversion originates within us. As is the case with all human behavior, distraction is just another way our brains attempt to deal with pain. If we accept this fact, it makes sense that the only way to handle distraction is by learning to handle discomfort. If distraction costs us time, then time management is pain management.
Which I felt was a decent stab at the heart of the issue.
I'm in a similar situation and need help as well. What did you find works, or worked?
https://www.guilford.com/books/Taking-Charge-of-Adult-ADHD/R...
what ultimately works is asking for help, accepting that yes, it might not be what you want, but it gets you through this hurdle. maybe the next one will be easier. and get up to speed and then work on doing it alone, and then work on doing your best.
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.
Take heart: “ADHD impairs the functioning of highly intelligent people, so the disorder can be diagnosed in this group. A population-based birth cohort study of over 5700 children found no significant differences among children with high, average, or low IQ and ADHD in median age at which ADHD criteria were met, rates of learning disorders, psychiatric disorders, and substance abuse, and rates of stimulant treatment (Katusic et al., 2011; Rommelse et al., 2017).”
https://www.adhdevidence.org/ics#diagnosed
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 do, these are milestones that are average/good to have at these times within your PhD, these are examples of people having done a great PhD, and so on.
If your supervisor is a bit hands-off then you're kind of thrown into a job/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.
Anyone else finding this weird? Is it similar or different in industry/non-academic jobs?
I can only speak for CS academia and industry. It is very different in the industry.
In my industry jobs, there is a lot of structure. New grads are often given very close direction and very specific tasks to complete for at least 3-6 months. Then over the next 1-2 years what's expected from you becomes less and less clear, gradually, until you can function somewhat independently. A new grad complaining to a skip that they were not given clear tasks was a Major Fail for their manager/TL. Your manager/TL is required to do this for a new grad, or they were dinged.
In my academic life, you had about as much structure as your advisor provided. About half the advisors did have a plan and genuinely cared. The other half just expected their students to figure it out. It's the students of the former that "succeeded" - i.e. went on to do novel meaningful research. The rest either muddled through till something clicked, or quit. A new student couldn't complain to anyone. There was no structure beyond your advisor. Your entire future is basically in the hands of one person.
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.
Part of the problem is that most "university" studies, especially US colleges, are too similar to high school with rigid schedules and teachers closely leading classes throughout the semester. Other models where students are more responsible for organizing and completing their studies foster building independence at an earlier stage already.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.