I've procrastinated working on my thesis for more than a year
If you&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>Remember the only rule is keep typing. Even if it means typing random nonsense for awhile.<p>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&#x27;m trying to make. Full of cliches and tropes in writing. Amateur coding mistakes if it&#x27;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&#x27;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.<p>But it still works. After you have <i>something</i> even it&#x27;s an abomination, it gets your brain thinking about it and working on it, and it&#x27;s so much easier to make the obvious improvements, and then more, and eventually you are just doing things normally.