Hatewriting a PhD thesis
Not sure if the same time limits apply everywhere, so just to be safe: in Czechia you get 3 years of full-time PhD study, extendable to 4. After that you can add up to 3 more years in distance study mode.
My 4 years were up.
I had submitted all the required publications, some still conditionally accepted, completed all the teaching and coursework, and had most of the literature review done.
I was mostly waiting on the last couple of acceptances. Then I planned to finish writing.
Since my stipend was up, I started a job, thinking I would finish the thesis over weekends. I was determined to wrap it up during the first year of distance study.
It did not go well.
I hoped to write 10 pages every weekend. Not only did I almost never hit that goal, but some weekends the page count actually went down because I kept re-editing previous sections.
The mood kept souring.
Finally, as the first year was closing in and I hated every minute of writing, I decided I wanted it done on schedule.
So I took a 2-week vacation from work for the sole purpose of finishing the blasted thing.
The plan was simple: 50 pages in 10 days. No editing. Just pile the slop until all the meat and bones were there. This was before 2022, so even slop took effort. Then I would spend 4 days turning it into something I wouldn’t hate.
I hated every single day of it.
With passion.
And with increasing distaste for my own publications, which until that moment I had considered decent. In the moment, I hated every bit of them, because I couldn’t just copy-paste. I had to rewrite everything.
Every formula, every premise, every claim. I hate-typed it all. I chased the end of each chapter, then the end of each section, then the end of each paragraph.
And I made it.
Ten days. Exactly as planned.
I didn’t even need the full 4 days for edits, because I was so resentful of the whole thing that after two days I thought: good enough.
I remember sending it to my supervisor with a message, paraphrasing but not by much:
I am sending the penultimate version, pending one more grammar pass. If it is more likely to pass than not, please just tell me I can submit it, because I don’t think I have the willpower to work on it anymore.
At that point we were very friendly, and he knew how much I was struggling.
He replied:
It’s good. Submit it. Congratulations.
Only years later could I look at it properly. Some parts are clunky, but overall it was not bad considering half of it was written over 4 years and the other half essentially in two weeks.
I’m not sure if this helps anyone, but I wanted to share it because I think “productivity” sometimes sounds too clean.
This was not clean.
It was containment. I took the task, put a fence around it, lowered the standard from “good” to “submittable,” and hatewrote until it existed.
Like I said, not really a motivational story, but still … something?