Post a graph of how many words you have written. Either 100% publicly or within your circle of colleagues/friends. Update it every week to show/see progress.

I have three fairly different suggestions, and I hope at least one will resonate with you. All three of these suggestions worked for me, but they also fit my personality. At the time of writing my thesis, I was extremely reluctant to write, but I got through it and so will you.

The first suggestion is to create external social pressure. Find a real deadline that will both you impact you and your relationship with others if it is not met. For me, I had a scheduled start to a postdoc contingent on completing my PhD on time.

The second suggestion is to read How to Write a Lot by Paul J. Silva. It's short, but in the interest of time, you don't need to read the whole thing. The book offers two key motivations. First, it relentless hammers the point that you just have to write. No matter what. Just write something. Second, and strongly related, is that the quality of your writing comes second to the act of writing. Tell yourself that you're going to come back and edit text, the important thing is to just get something written down.

The third suggestion is to add exercise, and in particular outdoor running. This will help with your focus, your sleep, and your energy levels. If running isn't for you, then choose some form of cardio that can be done outdoors. While weight lifting is important for long term health, I would not advise adding it for this particular goal as it can leave you tired, especially in the beginning.

Separate from the frame of this Manifold question, please DM me if you think a short conversation would be helpful. I'd be happy to have a short video call or correspond in text.

I'm afraid I can't be of much assistance but will recommend reading this book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23461426-how-to-write-a-thesis

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What kind of PhD is it, out of curiosity?

I don't have much in the way of advice here except to chime in that beeminder.com is in my expense an excellent way to make sure you don't renege on things it's important to build up bit by bit.

I got a PhD in 2020. I read a lot of books on the same lines, and there's plenty of fancy incentive systems or structures if you prefer to follow that, but they all boil down to this:

Treat it like a day job and commit to a certain number of hours on it every day. Don't judge the product, just hit the hours. Don't evaluate it compared to anyone else's work, just hit the hours. Sometimes it comes easy, sometimes it comes hard, but if you make, say 10-3 every day your non-negotiable work time, you will finish. It's a game of consistency, not of genius or inspiration. The best dissertation is a submitted one.

I think by far the hardest part of being in a PhD program is having low oversight and high autonomy, and if you combine that with any form of perfectionist streak or attention disorders it's very very easy to procrastinate. I finished the entirety of mine in about 6 months (secondary data analysis) once I simply committed to just doing the thing (mainly because my funding was running out), and in retrospect, I could have graduated at last a year earlier.

Use chatGPT to divide your thesis into tasks. For each task ask for divide into subtasks and set deadlines for each for the rest of the year. Make sure to set the last deadline to before 15 december, so you have some room if something happens. Good luck!

To overcome task starting inertia, Just commit to doing 5 minutes of work on it at a time, and truly allow yourself to bail after 5 minutes if you really aren't feeling it. Most of the time this allows me to overcome the irrational mental hurdle of starting, and continuing is much easier and reasonable once I've already started, but it's important to actually allow yourself to stop sometimes for the trick to keep working.

Also, using apps and extensions that limit my time on distracting apps and websites is criminally underrated. Setting a limit of an hour a day on, say, twitter, is more than enough time to catch up with the news for a day and not get sucked into a dopamine whirlpool. stayfocused is a good app for desktop for this too.

Three, use reward bundling for extra motivation, tie arbitrary positive rewards (that you were already going to do) to small milestones to motivate yourself to do them. Like, "after I finish this paragraph/task, I'll let myself watch an episode of my show, snack, dessert, etc"

Last, consider becoming medicated if you haven't been officially diagnosed with adhd yet. donefirst (in the us), is pretty good at streamlining the process and making it easy to get medication to see if it helps. For the longest time I procrastinated getting officially diagnosed because of the task starting inertia, but it made an enormous difference in my life, lifted me out of depression (because I was actually able to get everyday things done) and helped me manage long term projects like a thesis much more easily.

I also have ADHD, so fwiw I will share what helped me write a book. I am not a morning person, but I got up two hours early each day and wrote. I think being slightly sleepy helped keep my mind from wandering too much. The rest of the day I had a positive feeling from already making progress that day. After a few days of starting that, I found it easier to get out of bed so early because I knew I was going to make progress.

Good luck! I hope you find what works best for you!

Honestly, consider hiring a life-coach. You need a cheerleader who can get you through and to whom you will be accountable.

You’ve got this. I believe in you.

Set a Beeminder goal for "number of pages written so far"

Things that help me (in a neurodivergent/ADHD context) to get non-fun things done: this game, 25 pomodoros with friends online

Ben Kuhn’s post on the unreasonable effectiveness of one-on-ones is a small routine with potentially huge returns. Would recommend!