Dissertation Tips

Vomit Draft 1

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 haveĀ somethingĀ even it's an abomination,Ā 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.

Vomit Draft 2

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?").

Vomit Draft 3

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.

Perfectionism

Anecdotally Iā€™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.

Quote

"Thereā€™s one solution that each and every book on writerā€™s block offers: write five words. Any five words. Follow this advice, Mr. Ashbery, and youā€™ll never have writerā€™s block again." - Kenneth Goldsmith

Correcting something is much easier than coming up with it. - Cunningham's Law

Three habits