Laziness and loss of drive

[renster]

I had an experience something like this when working on my thesis. The biggest piece of advice I can offer based on my experience is to make sure that you communicate with your thesis sponsor. By that, I don't mean tell him / her that you have no drive left - I mean that you should try to formulate the difficulties you are having into specific questions and bring them these issues. In my case, the lack of motivation became the greatest when I felt like I had lost track of the main question behind my research - sounds silly, but this is surprisingly easy to do, especially if you have had to modify your thesis question during the process of research. Having a poorly delineated question made the project feel like it would just continue to drag on and on, and made it really difficult to break down into manageable tasks that I could tackle one at a time - each task seemed to necessitate some other task, which necessitated some other task, ad infinitum. Once I had refocused, I was able to create a specific set of steps which I could jam through and finish the thing. I think that contacting my thesis sponsor with specific questions earlier would have eliminated a good portion of the slog of the process because she helped me refocus based on the questions I was asking.

I do that too! I'm working on a research project right now for someone else and I haven't done hardly any work on it when I'm not exhausted - too stressed to sleep, but too tempted by other daytime activities to work on the damn thing.