I also haven't figured it out yet.
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!
I felt completely burnt out back then (still do to an extent). I wonder if allowing myself to work on something else to relax would have helped? on the other hand, it's much easier to just continue once you're on a streak. And you can alway dig deeper, which is so tempting.
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.
I'm also lucky to have a super understanding advisor who is invested in my personal growth.
Everything will be alright, take care.
Just as long as you don't hit an administrative blocker, that is. In my case, I never submitted the thesis, because my request to extend the time coincided with the faculty being split in two and completely overhauled - so instead of extension, I was told that, because of "syllabus changes", I would need to repeat the entire MSc level (2 years) to be able to submit the thesis now. I politely declined.
The title made it simple Adaptive monitoring.
I worked in a small AI/ML company as an "SRE" (back then we haven't even heard of that acronym), so it seemed like a good fit. Just throw in some predictors, train it on the alerting data (when the oncall person just ignores it and the alert is not solved then it was a real false positive, right?) and so on. Also based on confidence scores decrease sampling rate for stuff that doesn't tend to break. Oh and also the local agent should pull the some pretrained predictors from the controller so it can locally switch to higher sampling if some patterns occur, this would catch those pesky hard to debug transient bugs/errors.
...
truth be told I got lost in chapter 1, because I had no idea what to actually write and implement from all this.
so no thesis, but years later I got a nice part of an ADHD diagnosis out of it!
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.
<3, stranger
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.
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.
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!
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.
Also, have you talked to your advisor about this procrastination problem, your fears, and the possibility of quitting? He sounds like an approachable person.
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!
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.
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 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 appreciated the post.
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.
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...