Punishment & Reward - How to get past that Thesis Fear

So I have problems, big ones, getting the motivation to work on my thesis. It seems that I have developed what I have dubbed "Thesis Fear". Thesis Fear can be described as the giant feeling of despair when you think about your thesis - either you have writer's block, or have fear that an experiment isn't going to go well or sometimes just the feeling that you are completely off-track. Instead of working on my thesis, I do more hours of job work (I work part-time), or flick between different thesis activities, hoping that I will suddenly feel like working on one of them.

This state is very difficult to get out of and I believe it is a form of Thesis-induced depression. 

At my weekly dinner with M club, I was discussing my issues, when one friend told me about his Thesis Punishment Scheme. He had to do the 20 hours of Master's work a week. For the first hour he failed to do, he must run 5 km... and then add on an extra kilometer for every hour he misses. He invited me to his punishment scheme. I chose my hours to 18 a week. (8 of Thursday, 8 on Friday, and 2 that I have to fit in somewhere). Master's needed to become priority one. And at least if I wasn't doing Master's, I was keeping healthy.

I don't know what it is, but it is working. Maybe its the competition? Perhaps it's just the idea that someone is checking up on your (and you on them) constantly to see how many hours you've done? Perhaps it is the fear of punishment?  But I just sit down and FORCE myself to work. We believe that it allows one to automatically set very small short goals (what I believe is the key to getting anything done in life) thus inspiring productivity.

It also helped me realize something about myself. I struggle with the routine of sitting in the same lab all day, eating the same lunch, seeing the same people. I get very bored and struggle to concentrate when my surroundings become uninteresting. I figured that if I allowed everything else to vary according to what I felt like, and just make sure I got my hours done, I could get more done. I need things to be dynamic. I must allow myself to work on a Saturday or at Midnight. I never used to do this. I used to say "MUST WORK 9 to 5", and decided that my evenings and my weekends were for myself. But life just doesnt fit to my strict schedule. So I must learnt to adapt. 

For this, I initiated reward scheme - Thesis by Coffee shop. If I just cant convince myself to sit in my lab any longer or cant motivate myself in the morning to go there in the first place, I choose a coffee shop or restaurant (or even a park if I have stuff to be read) which has wifi (preferably) and go work there for a few hours. The music is different, people are coming and going - general busyness, I can drink and eat something different every time. It makes working on my thesis a little bit more novel. Eventually, I am forced to go to my lab - when I need to do some serious programming or lots of data analysis - but I really do enjoy thesising in a coffee shop. I think perhaps that is the reward for working on my thesis - being able to go somewhere cool to do it.

I have made more progress in the last 3 weeks with my running punishment and coffee-shopping than I have all year. Nearly time to run those experiments! I guess that I need punishment and reward and that helps me get past my thesis fear. Do you suffer from thesis fear? Do you have a thesis punishment and reward system?

Remember to follow me on twitter: Follow @alienelf

So how's research?

I realized that I hadn't made a specific post about this awesome thing, so it is time! (It is also Friday, and I struggle to get much done on Fridays)

I was lucky enough to join a research group where a group of us graduates (about 6 of us who had completed our under-grad together) began our MScs at the same time. For those of you who dont know, MScs are rarely course based these days in South Africa. Instead, they are MScs by thesis and the thesis tends to be on the scale of a Phd (at least in our research group). 

At some stage, my good friend Christien and I were chatting about Masters and she concluded it would be a cool idea to meet once a week, to discuss our thesis then work on it for a few hours afterwards in the library. We discussed it with the gang, and we all concluded that although we probably wouldn't all be able to work on our thesis's at the same time, but it would certainly be beneficial to meet once a week to discuss problems, complain about supervisors and such. 

And that was the birth of M club. Every Monday night, us graduates meet at a different restaurant - fun and informal, order some good food and ask each person the question-that-must-not-be-asked "How is research?" and listen to and discuss each person's answer. In this way, we motivate each other to plow on through, share productivity tricks, how to communicate with one's supervisor and (because we are all a group of Computer Scientists) give advice solving the obstacles we have reached with our thesis. Just sometimes explaining your issues to other people makes things clearer as well as minimizes that feeling of not making any progress even though you work on it all the time. 

Everyone gets there chance to speak and everyone listens. 

Recently, we started with a primitive reward system - if you achieved something on your thesis (no matter how small) in the past week, you get a sweetie :) Silly, but effective. 

M Club has been one of the most enjoyable and beneficial part of the first year of my MSc (ours are traditionally 2 - 3 years long). And I advise any group of researchers to start their own M club ^_^ 

SCRUMing my Thesis... Lets go!

My brain melted about 20 minutes ago, so I figured it was time for a post.

I had been contemplating it for a while, but I finally decided that this is what I needed to do:
SCRUM my thesis.

For those of you who dont know SCRUM, Scrum is a process used for agile software development. A project makes progress via a series of iterations known as Sprints, which are generally 2-4 weeks long. The planning of a spring is essential. SCRUM lends itself well to projects with rapidly changing or highly emergent requirements.

SCRUM is generally used in software development. Considering that I am a Computer Scientist, I figured this might even apply to a Scientific Thesis - particularly one in computer science where I have to code as well.

The main activities of SCRUM are as follows:

1. A Sprint Product Meeting - list of tasks are created to be performed during the sprint.
2. Daily Scrum Meeting: Every day, a daily SCRUM meeting is attended by all team members, for maximum 15 minutes - everybody stands. Members share what was worked on the prior day, what will be worked on today and any  obstacles that are decreasing progress. 
3. Sprint review - performed at the end of a Scrum sprint. Functionality is demonstrated. The goal is to get feedback from the product owner. 

Those are the basics. Obviously there are some GLARING problems with this model in terms of thesis writing. In most (all) cases, we do not get to see our supervisor every day for 15 minutes in the morning.

In fact, often we don't get to see them every 2-4 weeks (although I try make a point of doing so, if at all possible). 

However, the main idea is quite useful. The sprint product meeting where one sits with oneself, and sets up a list of thesis related tasks to be performed during the sprint. If one can sit with one's supervisor at the beginning of each SCRUM, then how beneficial would that be?

Before I thought about using SCRUM, I would create lists too... all the time. But I found I either end up creating lists for too small an amount of time (multiple detailed things I needed to do in an hour) or a list for too large an amount of time ( like for the entire period of my thesis, where I end up wandering lost between items in the list). The SCRUM amount is for 2 - 4 weeks. Just the perfect amount of time. 

The daily scrum meeting is more like a sanity check for the thesis writer: "Yes, I did manage to do something constructive today - this is what it was. Today I will make more progress on this and these were the issues hindering me". I don't know about you, but I generally really really need a daily sanity check. 

As for the Sprint review - this is the little "reward" session where you can demonstrate to yourself what you have achieved during the sprint. And if possible, running what you have done by your supervisor at this point, WOULD be a useful feedback session. 

SCRUM has 2 important artifacts that are both relevant to thesis writing: 

- scrum product backlog - the complete list of functionality that remains to be added to the product (thesis)

- sprint backlog - a to do list for the sprint. 

- the burndown chart - shows the amount of work remaining

Luckily for me, my supervisor has agreed to have monthly group Thesis sessions (All his MSc and Phd students in one room). This will be the perforect opportunity for my Sprint product meeting and Sprint Review. 

The other awesome part about scrum are the useful tools that exist for the methodology. My favorite being the Kanban board. 

The kan ban board is a board with a few sections and some sticky notes. Each task is written down on a sticky note, including a duration, owner, deadline etc. The colours of the sticky notes can be related to priority of the job or the owner of the job. It has sections for tasks to be done, tasks that are in progress and tasks that are already done. Sounds brainless doesn't it? Turns out, the kanban board has become super popular in a large amount of domains where productivity is required. 

What is really fun, is that there exist free online versions, my favourite being Trello. Try it out. It has been a productivity saver for me. No more annoying lists, that get lost and spilt on. No sticky notes that fall off the screen or wall. And so far, it really seems to be helping my thesis.

This week I had an unofficial run of my first sprint. From next week I will set up a longer sprint and inform my supervisor what I am doing. I will be posting again about my progress. :)

I know this is a rushed post, but I wanted to get the jist of it on paper. I will update and go into more details soon.