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Regular reminder to anyone that needs it, probably OP:
Binging TV or games is often a coping measure, albeit a not very good one. It can make us feel more panicked and exacerbate self worth issues. I know this because I do it a lot and try to give myself this same advice. Because of this, I also know that what I’m saying here is hard to internalise, especially when the world has you inundated with messages that drag you down.
But you are not the problem. You have problems, and sometimes you fuck up and make things harder for yourself, but you are trying your best and the fact it feels like you’re barely scraping by is more a function of the fucked up world than it is of you. Try not to beat yourself up too much for struggling.
I know it’s a different kind of demoralising to acknowledge this, and that it’s a different disempowering to believe that fucked up things aren’t necessarily your fault, but try to be kind to yourself. The world is shit, and I feel shit, but we’re trying our best, for ourselves and the world. Communities exist because it’s not possible or ideal for us to be struggling alone, and it’s harder to build that kind of support when you’re being harsh on yourself.
So whoever needs to hear it, I forgive you for procrastinating when you’re overwhelmed. It may well be a dumbass move that makes everything harder, but it can also be an imperfect coping measure to help you survive. Surviving is the bare minimum, sure, but it’s good, because it means that there’s the potential to be more than what your environment currently allows.
Thank you, I needed to read this. Currently trying to find a job in another state, and there’s just slim pickings. I want to get out of my current position and location so bad, but it’s depressing going on sites like Indeed and seeing nothing promising every day. So I just keep playing games each night, hoping for a change to… idk, fall in my lap?
Doesn’t sound like you’re waiting for things to fall in your lap to me, you’re actively searching and have formulated your plans to move away and make changes, when the right opportunity comes you’ll be ready to recognize and seize it.
another state
which one? if not Oregon where I live, maybe another user from your target state can see this and offer some more local labor guidance.
a big part of success is luck. sucks. but it means opportunity can come from unexpected places.
Funnily enough, yeah Oregon! Or Washington. I’m aiming to move somewhere in the Portland/Vancouver area. My job is… somewhat niche. There are several companies in the area, but many of them seem to be not so great/kind of slavedrivery. I interviewed with 3 so far, and the 1 I really liked ghosted me after I came up and spent a whole day hanging out with them at their office. The owner straight up had told me he’d send an offer my way, so no clue what happened there.
There are maybe a couple more I know about that I’d like to reach out to, but barring that i’m not sure what to do. There seem to be a LOT more companies up near Seattle, but well… it’s just about as expensive to live there as where I live now, and I don’t like big cities much.
Thanks for saying this… I have a lot of guilt because I left grad school early. I was hired at a company and my advisor urged me to take the rare job in exactly my field and we would finish my thesis later. It’s been a year and I’ve not defended. My advisor won’t even read what I have written even though I met with them and they agreed to. I had a lot written at one point but they said it was shit and to delete it and start over. When I think about it or about opening it I just feel panicked. When I was at university I had started to attend free counseling the school offered (because a lot of students had been committing suicide) and the counseling really helped me feel better but now I definitely can’t get any.
I don’t need to defend to have my job but I just want it over and I’m scared I won’t finish. One of my coworkers had been pestering me about it for a year and I finally just told them I did defend because I didn’t want them to talk to me like I’m stupid everyday. I feel bad about that too
Me and studying for exams. Me and writing my bachelor’s thesis which I ended up power writing in a ~18h+ long session with no sleep
Oh god I have been doing this for 2 years at uni and am failing so bad.
If it’s a paper asking your opinion or ideas on something, then I used buy a 6-pack of beer, sit down to write paper with some good music on, and just drunk write for about 3 hours. You’ll suprisingly write like 17 pages of bullshit and ramblings, but after you sober up, you can typically condense it down to about a solid 3 or so pages of legitimately good ideas to build off of. I used to love writing papers as I essentially made an event out of it.
Once I figured out my groove, I stopped the drinking and discovered that isolation was always key for me. I had to find a space without distractions. Our school library had a floor with hidden tables, rooms, and a rule that no talking was allowed. It was dead silent there…it was fantastic.
Not really writing any papers sadly. Not yet anyway. And even when I do there is no place for opinion in physics sadly.
Oh. Yeah, you’ll need to learn to write. Like a lot. lol
I’m in engineering. We write a LOT of reports, technical records, and documentation. If I did what I did back in highschool and early college. I’d have been fired years ago. And I guarantee you we write much less than you guys.
Good luck figuring it out!
Yeah but reports cannot really be written in the way you first described.
Nope, they cannot. Lol
100% agreed.
I’ve been repeating this to myself for the last year and I still haven’t written a word. Guess my paper will never see the light
I procrastinated myself right out of grad school. (A null result didn’t help – no epic papers to be had, so supervisor was disinterested.) Nevertheless, it’s a bad habit.
In industry, constantly being in crunch mode helps, because you never have time to procrastinate.
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It really depends on who you’re working for an what industry you’re in.
I’m in geoscience. When I was in near surface geophysics consulting, the industry version looks like: you’re deployed in the morning to do data collection (leave your hotel). Spend the day in the bush (not really a procrastination opportunity when you’re walking around with a magnetometer – you just walk). Then you get back, dump the data to your laptop and go get dinner. In the evening, you plot the data up as a QA pass, just to make sure there are no gaps or whatever. (Some procrastinating opportunities here, but they’re small.) Next day you repeat until you’ve covered your survey area.
Maximum 21 days in a row. You bank OT hours at 1.5x, so your 12 hour days is 8 hours salary, plus 4x1.5=6 hours banked. Weekend was 12x1.5=16 hours banked. 12x7 hours worked in a week (84 hours) means 66 hours banked.
When you get back to town, you make a report. Usually you’ve got a budget of about 8-16 hours to turn around the report, but they’re so similar to each other than it’s almost assembly line. It’s not like writing a paper where it’s original work. The equations exist, you just have to make the maps, and interpret them. So a day or two in the office. After that, you have 66 hours banked, so you take a week and a half off and still make your salary.
Lather rinse repeat.
I’ve worked in government geoscience offices and that same report that takes industry two days would take a government geologist a month. In grad school, you could get a whole M.Sc. off of that single site, stretching it out over a year or two! But you’d be expected to reinvent the wheel on all the processing and interpretation because it needs to be “novel” somehow.
In my first year after leaving grad school, I spent 7 months in the field. It was absolutely amazing. I got to travel everywhere, collect, process and report on dozens of unique targets using unique instruments. It was so much better than aimless procrastination.
But I do miss the academic community for the discussions that occurred at pubs, general inquisitiveness of people, and I loved seminars and talks and just being a knowledge sponge.
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I do that too. But I started my own business now, later in my career, and crunch time is of my own choosing. And weirdly, I’m most effective as a coder when binge coding – probably something about the context switching penalties.
To still feel productive and get that high from getting stuff done. I honestly spend hours and hours formatting my reports/papers. I think, I got a few compliments in the past (just the average kind people say when it’s clear someone put effort into something) and that solidified my procrastination.
It’s usually at least a 2:1 ratio of formatting to actually writing/researching content…
I need help…
The amount of time I spent going down into the deepest depths of LaTeX magic is probably larger than the amount of time spent on actual work for my master’s thesis.
Ah, I do the same with figures! Hours spent just to aling them perfectly
I spend three hours before every paper trying to find cool software to help me focus/write… only to end up writing it all in word.
Usually 15-20 minutes browsing fonts too… only to change it to times new roman when I’m done because it’s required
i feel seen, we’re two peas in a pod
Me but change “write” for “programming” and lab for generic “job”. I know this subreddit… It’s for what it is but I felt identified in some way…
It’s the same for my assignments lol
I did this too, and if you’re dead set on doing it I advise strongly to plug your ears, close your eyes, and go “LALALALALALA!” any time the job market is mentioned.
It made me completely and utterly depressed and I stopped learning all forms of development altogether.
People procrastinate for many different reasons, so you’ll end up trying all sorts of advice that may or may not work or it may only work sometimes. The two most common issues come down to either: A) You’re feeling stressed or anxious and need to relieve yourself from responsibilities, or B) Your mind has fallen into an “it’s not urgent enough, so putting too much effort right now isn’t worth it” fallacy. Overcoming both requires proper management of your emotions, but some people have it so bad in the first category that “managing their emotions” isn’t doable without large changes in their life, such as changing your job or your household dynamics.
When you’re on the second category, it’s best to cultivate an attitude of “these are my goals for today, so I’m going to actively manage the activities that kick off my dopamine”, but what’s the proper way of doing that depends on the person and their situation. Some people may find it very difficult to get started in the day without a little bit of pleasure, and some will find that having a little bit of pleasure first will not allow them to focus later on, because their mind craves for more. You should also find the proper balance between valuing sheer effort and achievements. If you’re satisfied with effort for effort’s sake, you may not focus as much as you might otherwise could (you’re just putting in your hours after all), but only accepting achievements as the measure of a proper work session will leave you demotivated when the challenge was harder than you had initially gauged.
This may remind me of going through my analysis data to perhaps figure out if I can get my last first author paper for phd. I should start that.
Tomorrow.
write random parts of paper like a pro
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