(no subject)

[rivka]

After a stretch of procrastination and avoidance long enough to be completely ridiculous, I've managed to finish pounding out the text of the Results section of my dissertation. It's only 18 pages long, double spaced, and it took me a month. And that's after I had already outlined it.

I don't understand why I do this sort of thing. I got completely hung up on it because it seems like such a specialized kind of writing, and I couldn't even make myself work on it. I carried a disk around for two weeks before realizing that it didn't have the right file on it, because I wasn't working on it. And the whole time, I kept thinking about how angry my advisor would be when I eventually sent it to him, because so much time would have passed, and he always yells at me for taking too much time on things. And, of course, all the while that I was thinking that, I still wasn't working on it.

I do this all the time. It's worse with my dissertation than with anything else, but procrastination and avoidance are truly my worst faults. They make me miserable. While they're happening, I have this horrible frozen vision of how much worse things are getting because I'm procrastinating and avoiding them... but it's so hard to make myself just sit down and get them done. It's never as bad as I expect it to be. It's always a tremendous relief to finish. And yet, for some reason that utterly confounds me, learning still doesn't seem to occur.

I drive myself crazy.

Okay. Now that I've got that off my chest, it's time to dive into making the figure and the 18 tables to go with the Results section. Isn't that weirdly lopsided? Maybe I need more figures.

Comments

[eeyorerin]

Procrastination and avoidance is one of my worst faults as well. There's still stuff I've been putting off since I started my dissertation project a year and a half ago.

The only thing helping me to move forward on the diss is setting monthly goals, printing them out, sticking them on the wall, and sternly admonishing myself. And even then, I'm not getting everything done.

[mouseman.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and you have no excuse such as moving to a new house in the last month. No, none whatsoever!

It seems to me that you can be a little bit easier on yourself. You can't do anything about the past. Now focus and go after it.

*hug*

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

I understand the frustration. Still, congratulations on GETTING IT DONE! Now get your butt onto AIM and celebrate with me! :-)

-J

[melebeth]

Two things..

1) I have so "been there, not done that." *hug*

2) I love that the frustrated icon is a windows logo!!!!!! I cackled.

[marykaykare.livejournal.com]

Seeble!

MKK

Testify, sister...

[txanne.livejournal.com]

My language study produced the very same feelings in me. And yet, even though my adviser hated it, I have my Ph.D. now! You will too, very soon. *hugs*

[minnaleigh.livejournal.com]

I know *eactly* what this is like. Oh the stories I could tell! I'm sure you know all the suggested ways of tackling the problem so I won't go into it except to say that repeated rewards was the way I went when I had the same problem with my dissertation. The thing might never have gotten written without Mike's Hard Raspberry Iced Tea. Being able to talk to Jennie was also a favourite and much sought after reward. I rewarded myself all over the plcace for even the smallest accomplishment and it was quite helpful.

If you think you'll be running into this problem again, come up with a set amount of work you have to get done and I'll have a pint of the most amazing ice cream ready to hand over when it's finished.

[elusis.livejournal.com]

I do the same thing - carrying research around for weeks without touching it, then killing myself at the end of crunch time.

I think my unconscious has to chew on stuff for a set period of time before I can write. I also sometimes wonder if I don't need to absorb some kind of writing energy via osmosis - touching books and papers, maybe reading them but not actually writing anything - before I can write coherently.

Then everything spills out of me in one long draft and I'm done. Makes for crazy time but it seems to work so far.

What people don't understand when I talk about writing a Master's thesis or my PhD quals in 2 weeks is that I accumulated info for the thesis over a period of 3 years, and that I was working on my quals in the back of my head for 4 years, 1 year very actively. I just didn't get anything on paper until 2 weeks prior to the deadline.

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

(falling into 'advice mode', which is my way of saying "ouch, I sympathize, I wish I could do something")

Sometimes - not always - I can break a procrastination jam by forcing myself to either

1) do ONE thing, that's all I have to do,
(the one thing can be arbitrarily small, but it sometimes starts an avalanche)
or
2) make myself sit and stare at the work for fifteen minutes, trying to get myself motivated. I don't have to *work*, but I have to at least see if my motivation magically appears.

Another thing that can help sometimes is, if you're suffering from blank page syndrome (which doesn't always *feel* like blank page syndrome, but that is more or less what it is, for me) is to get someone to either tell you the first step, or to get them to do the first step for you. Or, have someone else help you break it down into steps. This helps avoid the two things that make me procrastinate:

1) a vague feeling of "and then... and then I DON'T KNOW!" (what to do, or how to do it) Once it's planned out, instead of vague questions, I have specific ones, which means I don't have the panicky feeling I have from "unanswerables".

and

2) a feeling that it's too much work, without a feeling that "Okay, but there are 20 steps; if I do one, there are only 19 left."

[baratron.livejournal.com]

Well, I had much the same problem: I dithered and dithered about my thesis for literally months. I'm pretty sure this is a common problem, and it's made worse if your studies have been interrupted for any reason and/or if there is some kind of trauma associated with them. (In my case, having been very depressed for most of my time at college, my notes were in a complete state and going through them was too much for me to handle emotionally for a long time).

What I can report is that eventually, everything clicked and I felt happy instead of stressed. Finally, I'd read enough background material that I was confident in what I was doing, and it all came together - I was working 12-14 hours a day by choice, not because I was rushing to get it done (although that was a factor too). I never believed other people who said this before, but I really was enjoying my work by the end - it didn't seem like a chore anymore. I hope the same thing happens for you. But honestly, you can't push it, you can't get to that place just by wanting to be there.