I just want to say that this is extremely similar to my struggles with a Master’s degree. Mine is in geology, so your username continues the parallels amusingly. I’m a bit further along, with some marginal successes in efficiency. Here are some of the tactics that I have tried:
*Excercise. My diet is pretty terrible, but regular exercise to offset that has been invaluable. I used weight lifting (if I have a high-calorie diet, then I might as well put the energy to use)- the 5x5 schedule is a good way to gamify things a bit without introducing more complexity than its mindshare allows. This is probably the most useful habit that I have been able to maintain.
*Nootropics. Cautiously. 500mg Choline and about 1600mg Piracetam per day. These are cheap and extremely safe, with moderate-to-questionable benefits. Under this regimen, I have seen quantifiable improvements, including competitive game performance and concentration length. The placebo effect is a strong contender, but rationality means winning, so why not? Previously, I relied on caffeine as my performance enhancer, but the addictive downsides became distracting at the volumes I was using. I don’t know much about Modafinil, however.
*Pens. This one may be very specific to me and my response to tactile stimuli, but the consequences are good enough to be worth a shot. For the prose sections of your thesis, write in pen on paper. The paper doesn’t matter, but make sure to use a very comfortable pen (the Pilot G2 is my brand). This has three benefits- one, it adds a physicality to the process of writing, which helps to fight distraction with a range of physical inputs that a computer doesn’t provide. (Roughly similar to the process of reading or writing in a public place with white noise and background activity, I think.) Two, it is very hard to delete everything you just wrote and start over. This increases the volume of writing your produce in any given time interval, although it will need considerable editing after the fact. Three, it means that you can write in a room without computer or internet access. Leave your phone elsewhere, and you’ve taken away a large majority of potential distractions. If your brain is missing a detail, it is often possible to just bracket the [thing you don’t remember] and keep writing, rather than stopping to look it up and risking an infinite Wikipedia loop.
*Meditation. I tried this also, with some success- that is, I can achieve the mental state usually described as the desired goal. Detachment, hyper-awareness, etc. Philosophically, it has been extremely interesting to see the consequences of this achievement, but it didn’t improve productivity any. In fact, the results may have been negative (see ‘detachment’). Piercing the veil of the self is not a particularly efficient way to accumulate utils, but it does lower stress.
*Natural light patterns. Try to find a workspace with large windows and plenty of sunlight. Then, avoid turning on room lights except during ‘daylight’ hours. If you live in high latitudes, you may prefer to artificially extend your light periods to a full twelve hours during the winter. After the sun/‘sun’ goes down, dim your monitor significantly. This will regulate your sleeping schedule (and thus help build other habits). It will also keep you connected to other humans a bit better, which can stave off loneliness and increase happiness in subtle ways. And of course, this is also a good way to keep up your vitamins and so on.
*Accountability. I am much more productive when I am making regular status updates, with explicit expectations, to the people around me. My proposal was rapidly completed as soon as I began weekly meetings with my advisor, for example. But interested friends can be just as useful, as long as they’re reasonably competent to understand what you have achieved, and willing to spend a few minutes at regular intervals discussing your accomplishments. This is up there with my lifting routines in terms of importance, but your mileage may vary depending on your relationship with social power structures.
To emphasize, none of these were a magic bullet that changed my overall lifestyle. There’s still a very obvious pattern of procrastination, distraction, and last-minute binge work, and like you, I’m getting really nervous about how this will manifest itself in my career.
It’s also the case that a master’s degree is really, really hard to get, and the ability to summon an entire thesis from the ether is a part of that difficulty. Most people probably could not achieve such a degree at all; framing your struggles in terms of a deficiency relative to some loosely-defined average is unrealistic and unhelpful. This is true for your colleagues as well- each is an outlier, and the motivating factors that got them to this point are not likely to be directly comparable to your own. You are awesome enough that the bell-curve is not a useful self-assessment, so focus on tactics and not on placing yourself along a continuum.
Exercise: I recently started a regime of 2 x 1 hour bodyweight sessions / week with a friend of mine, but we haven’t had a session in a while because he recently took an injury boxing. I think I’ll start running on my own so I’m not so tied to that one activity (and in accordance with the advice in Optimal Exercise).
Pens: I actually like this advice. On the other hand, I use vim, a programmer’s editor, to write everything (including my prose), and I love love love it. (I’m even writing this reply in it.) The ‘feel’ (not only tactile) of being able to shunt text around so effortlessly (at the paragraph, sentence, clause, word level) is so pleasant that it’s hard to give up. On the other hand, there is some sense to what you say about working without a computer.
Natural light patterns: Good thinking. I work in a room with great sunlight during the day; so far so good. But a while ago my monitor broke, and I was able to fix it only by jettisoning its buttons. (Long story.) End result: my monitor is stuck on full brightness all the time. I just checked, though, and I found a linux program (Redshift) capable of adjusting the monitor brightness and colour temperature based on the time of day. I installed it and it seems to work; perhaps it will help. The lamp I use for reading at night also has a slightly harsh, blue-ish hue to it, though it isn’t excessively bright. I’ll see if I can do something about that, too.
Accountability: Hmmm. I’ll think about this. It’s certainly the case that periods of poor work correlate with seeing my tutor less. The causation isn’t just one-way, though: I’m also less likely to want to see him when things are going slowly. (Perhaps there’s something of a nasty positive feedback loop going on here.)
It’s also the case that a master’s degree is really, really hard to get, and the ability to summon an entire thesis from the ether is a part of that difficulty. Most people probably could not achieve such a degree at all; framing your struggles in terms of a deficiency relative to some loosely-defined average is unrealistic and unhelpful. This is true for your colleagues as well- each is an outlier, and the motivating factors that got them to this point are not likely to be directly comparable to your own. You are awesome enough that the bell-curve is not a useful self-assessment, so focus on tactics and not on placing yourself along a continuum.
You also might wish to consider the ways in which you learn or like to take on large projects. Personally, I am a list maker. I like to have a map a plan if you will. When I’m working on a novel I do the same thing and it may get revised several times before the work is completed. When I was in my Master’s program I had my system down so that I could wrote a 25 page paper on International Relations and associated topics in 3 days starting from research to final completion. To do that required caffeine, medication, and no sleep but it was what I had to do at the time to get the job done. You have to create a system, a habit, to do this. If you can find a reliable way of working rather than working ad hoc then you will be able to do more easily and tackle large projects in the future.
I just want to say that this is extremely similar to my struggles with a Master’s degree. Mine is in geology, so your username continues the parallels amusingly. I’m a bit further along, with some marginal successes in efficiency. Here are some of the tactics that I have tried:
*Excercise. My diet is pretty terrible, but regular exercise to offset that has been invaluable. I used weight lifting (if I have a high-calorie diet, then I might as well put the energy to use)- the 5x5 schedule is a good way to gamify things a bit without introducing more complexity than its mindshare allows. This is probably the most useful habit that I have been able to maintain.
*Nootropics. Cautiously. 500mg Choline and about 1600mg Piracetam per day. These are cheap and extremely safe, with moderate-to-questionable benefits. Under this regimen, I have seen quantifiable improvements, including competitive game performance and concentration length. The placebo effect is a strong contender, but rationality means winning, so why not? Previously, I relied on caffeine as my performance enhancer, but the addictive downsides became distracting at the volumes I was using. I don’t know much about Modafinil, however.
*Pens. This one may be very specific to me and my response to tactile stimuli, but the consequences are good enough to be worth a shot. For the prose sections of your thesis, write in pen on paper. The paper doesn’t matter, but make sure to use a very comfortable pen (the Pilot G2 is my brand). This has three benefits- one, it adds a physicality to the process of writing, which helps to fight distraction with a range of physical inputs that a computer doesn’t provide. (Roughly similar to the process of reading or writing in a public place with white noise and background activity, I think.) Two, it is very hard to delete everything you just wrote and start over. This increases the volume of writing your produce in any given time interval, although it will need considerable editing after the fact. Three, it means that you can write in a room without computer or internet access. Leave your phone elsewhere, and you’ve taken away a large majority of potential distractions. If your brain is missing a detail, it is often possible to just bracket the [thing you don’t remember] and keep writing, rather than stopping to look it up and risking an infinite Wikipedia loop.
*Meditation. I tried this also, with some success- that is, I can achieve the mental state usually described as the desired goal. Detachment, hyper-awareness, etc. Philosophically, it has been extremely interesting to see the consequences of this achievement, but it didn’t improve productivity any. In fact, the results may have been negative (see ‘detachment’). Piercing the veil of the self is not a particularly efficient way to accumulate utils, but it does lower stress.
*Natural light patterns. Try to find a workspace with large windows and plenty of sunlight. Then, avoid turning on room lights except during ‘daylight’ hours. If you live in high latitudes, you may prefer to artificially extend your light periods to a full twelve hours during the winter. After the sun/‘sun’ goes down, dim your monitor significantly. This will regulate your sleeping schedule (and thus help build other habits). It will also keep you connected to other humans a bit better, which can stave off loneliness and increase happiness in subtle ways. And of course, this is also a good way to keep up your vitamins and so on.
*Accountability. I am much more productive when I am making regular status updates, with explicit expectations, to the people around me. My proposal was rapidly completed as soon as I began weekly meetings with my advisor, for example. But interested friends can be just as useful, as long as they’re reasonably competent to understand what you have achieved, and willing to spend a few minutes at regular intervals discussing your accomplishments. This is up there with my lifting routines in terms of importance, but your mileage may vary depending on your relationship with social power structures.
To emphasize, none of these were a magic bullet that changed my overall lifestyle. There’s still a very obvious pattern of procrastination, distraction, and last-minute binge work, and like you, I’m getting really nervous about how this will manifest itself in my career.
It’s also the case that a master’s degree is really, really hard to get, and the ability to summon an entire thesis from the ether is a part of that difficulty. Most people probably could not achieve such a degree at all; framing your struggles in terms of a deficiency relative to some loosely-defined average is unrealistic and unhelpful. This is true for your colleagues as well- each is an outlier, and the motivating factors that got them to this point are not likely to be directly comparable to your own. You are awesome enough that the bell-curve is not a useful self-assessment, so focus on tactics and not on placing yourself along a continuum.
Thanks for the thoughtful response.
Exercise: I recently started a regime of 2 x 1 hour bodyweight sessions / week with a friend of mine, but we haven’t had a session in a while because he recently took an injury boxing. I think I’ll start running on my own so I’m not so tied to that one activity (and in accordance with the advice in Optimal Exercise).
Pens: I actually like this advice. On the other hand, I use vim, a programmer’s editor, to write everything (including my prose), and I love love love it. (I’m even writing this reply in it.) The ‘feel’ (not only tactile) of being able to shunt text around so effortlessly (at the paragraph, sentence, clause, word level) is so pleasant that it’s hard to give up. On the other hand, there is some sense to what you say about working without a computer.
Natural light patterns: Good thinking. I work in a room with great sunlight during the day; so far so good. But a while ago my monitor broke, and I was able to fix it only by jettisoning its buttons. (Long story.) End result: my monitor is stuck on full brightness all the time. I just checked, though, and I found a linux program (Redshift) capable of adjusting the monitor brightness and colour temperature based on the time of day. I installed it and it seems to work; perhaps it will help. The lamp I use for reading at night also has a slightly harsh, blue-ish hue to it, though it isn’t excessively bright. I’ll see if I can do something about that, too.
Accountability: Hmmm. I’ll think about this. It’s certainly the case that periods of poor work correlate with seeing my tutor less. The causation isn’t just one-way, though: I’m also less likely to want to see him when things are going slowly. (Perhaps there’s something of a nasty positive feedback loop going on here.)
Thanks. This actually did help.
You also might wish to consider the ways in which you learn or like to take on large projects. Personally, I am a list maker. I like to have a map a plan if you will. When I’m working on a novel I do the same thing and it may get revised several times before the work is completed. When I was in my Master’s program I had my system down so that I could wrote a 25 page paper on International Relations and associated topics in 3 days starting from research to final completion. To do that required caffeine, medication, and no sleep but it was what I had to do at the time to get the job done. You have to create a system, a habit, to do this. If you can find a reliable way of working rather than working ad hoc then you will be able to do more easily and tackle large projects in the future.