Procrastination Resolution
·How to push yourself for work :
1) yes discipline is important when you know that this activity hampers your productivity, then dont do it.
2) overthinking or worrying doesnot help, but helping your subconscious mind to take over and find solutions.
3) be strategic towards increasing your productivity ie do what will help.
4) building momentum helps for the actual work
5) before Thursday : I have given myself activities but am I too late defining them or I should be doing work other ways. Conceptual map is important for the work, yes. But working on the paper or doing experimentation is the activity that can push things forward.
6) I come I sit I judge myself. I am not able to build momentum. I know what I need to do.
7) I have to accept that no one is coming anymore neither for motivation or inspiration. All I can do is keeping asking why I started doing it in the first place. Resolve self-doubts or regarding work. Keep investing myself in the work. But keep moving forward above the doubts and feeling lethargic. I should be more optimistic and curious towards the research process.\
8) I am learning how to invalidate doubts by proofs using mathematics as well as making decisions to change the direction when needed.
9) Giving yourself goals for weekly and daily helped previously as well. The least thing you can do daily is start. But what hinders it :
- I dont follow through the work I was doing previously. I start getting stuck in the trap of procrastination. In this case giving goals doesnot help.
- When I have to decide everyday what do I need to do today.\
10) What Prof Vikram Gadre suggested when I asked him how to deal with failure in the research process? I remember a few points :
- Talk to your supervisor about the failures\
- Keep a backtrack point in your research that you can go back to it if you fail in the process\
11) Keep a constraint on how much time you spent on thinking about the problem and actually facing it.\
12) I always kept thinking, feelings, life, decision, control, emotions separate and found strategies to deal with them separately. Things are mixing. And am learning how to face them. Its ok to start small and build muscles with time.
13) You know thats how I used to work till now. Allow my mind to process problems with the unconscious mind. And accept the solution. So I rewarded procrastination. But I dont think that strategy is helping me anymore. Accept that you are lazy. I judge things, people and myself to not prevent myself going in that direction and protect myself. But I cant rely on that thinking always because research is not allowing me to do that. It needs proof to reject something.
14) Take help of your body and thoughts to change needed for the research.
15) Keep the journals handy so that I can get a second brain. I dont have to memorize everything.
16) I relied on emotional safety till now. I thought it will help keeping my life in control. But I know that this is not true. Better to keep the life focused and in control. I hope I can overcome my fears.
17) Keeping myself focused is the only work I have.
18) Keep candies to your side. A little sugar gives your little energy.
Don’t believe in yourself. Believe in the process.
This may sound strange.
Most people try to maintain:
“I believe my idea is good.”
But research eventually destroys that belief.
Then they crash.
A more durable belief is:
“I may be wrong, but I can investigate.”
That belief survives failure.
What helped many great researchers
They didn’t wake up every day thinking:
“I am a genius.”
They often thought:
“I am curious enough to keep looking.”
Richard Feynman repeatedly emphasized the importance of not fooling yourself and being willing to live with uncertainty.
The confidence wasn’t:
“I know.”
The confidence was:
“I can keep exploring.”
Separate identity from ideas
One of the biggest causes of research paralysis is:
My idea fails
↓
Therefore I am not good enough
Instead:
My idea fails
↓
I learned something about reality
The second mindset allows you to continue.
how much to rely on the framework that i created for myself in regards to research :
I think you have to start from some point and that framework can help me starting the work.
what to do when you think you are not very adaptable thinking wise and how it can harm your research. how to develop it? :
How to develop adaptability
1. Fall in love with questions, not answers
Instead of:
“Temporal modeling is important.”
Try:
“When is temporal modeling important?”
The second question is much easier to update.
2. Keep a “Reasons I Might Be Wrong” section
For every research idea.
Example:
Hypothesis:
Audio helps boundary localization.
Possible reasons wrong:
- visual cues already sufficient
- dataset audio is noisy
- annotations are inaccurate
This keeps the mind flexible.
3. Deliberately seek disconfirming evidence
Ask:
What result would surprise me?
If nothing can surprise you, you’re becoming rigid.
4. Study opposing papers
When you find a paper supporting your belief:
Read another that challenges it.
This is especially useful in your current interests:
- Transformers vs Mamba
- Temporal vs spatial modeling
- Video-only vs audio-visual
5. Separate self-worth from hypotheses
A hypothesis failing is not evidence that you’re a poor researcher.
In fact:
Many strong researchers are wrong repeatedly.
What makes them strong is:
They notice quickly and update.
A research habit I think would help you
Once a month, write:
What I currently believe
Example:
- Temporal modeling is underexplored in surveillance.
- Audio helps localization.
- Long-range context matters.
What evidence supports this?
What evidence challenges this?
What would change my mind?
That last question is powerful.
If you can answer it, you’re still adaptable.
The deeper issue
I suspect your fear isn’t actually:
“I am not adaptable.”
It’s closer to:
“What if I commit to a direction and later discover it was wrong?”
But that is not a sign of poor adaptability.
Adaptability is what allows you to recover when that happens.
Research is not about choosing a perfect direction once.
It’s about repeatedly updating your understanding while staying committed long enough to learn something.
The researchers who grow the fastest are usually not the ones with the best initial ideas. They are the ones who can hold a belief strongly enough to test it, and lightly enough to change it when reality disagrees.
**The deeper issue
I suspect your fear isn’t actually:
“I am not adaptable.”
It’s closer to:
“What if I commit to a direction and later discover it was wrong?” true. how to resolve it to motivate yourself to do the actual work?
Research is not a path-finding problem.
It is a path-creating problem.
The belief that may help you
Instead of believing:
“This must be the correct direction.”
Believe:
“No matter what happens, I will extract understanding from this direction.”
Those are very different beliefs.
The second one is much more realistic.
What actually gets wasted
Usually not the “wrong” direction.
What gets wasted is:
Months of hesitation
↓
No experiments
↓
No evidence
↓
No learning
That is much harder to recover from.
A mindset shift that researchers eventually make
Early-stage thinking:
“I need confidence before I start.”
Later-stage thinking:
“The work is what creates confidence.”
Not the other way around.
A practical exercise
When you’re stuck thinking:
“What if this direction is wrong?”
Answer these three questions.
1. What will I learn if it works?
Write it.
2. What will I learn if it fails?
Write it.
3. Is that learning valuable?
Usually the answer is yes.
Once you see that both outcomes teach you something, the emotional pressure decreases.
What to motivate yourself with
I wouldn’t motivate yourself using:
“This will definitely become my thesis.”
That’s too uncertain.
Instead motivate yourself with:
“Today I am reducing uncertainty.”
Every experiment,
every paper,
every reproduction,
reduces uncertainty.
That is progress even when results are negative.
I dont follow through the work I was doing previously. I start getting stuck in the trap of procrastination. In this case giving goals doesnot help. :
- **So when avoidance triggers it is either due to a fear, or a limiting belief that goes opposite to the skills required for research. Better to address that.
- **Other than this you have already wrote about most of the hurdles in the research either personal limits or regarding the research process
- **Dont avoid the voice in your head, either its an emotion or a matter that is appearing in the head. Address it.
One thing I notice
You spend a lot of time thinking about:
- frameworks
- research philosophy
- directions
- future thesis
Those are valuable.
But they can also become a refuge from uncertainty.
Because thinking about research feels safer than doing research.
A question for you
When you procrastinate, what are you usually avoiding?
Is it:
A. Boredom
“This is repetitive.”
B. Confusion
“I don’t know what to do next.”
C. Fear
“What if I do all this and it’s not useful?”
D. Perfectionism
“I need a better plan before I start.”
From our conversations, I suspect C and D are bigger than A.
A mindset that may help
Instead of:
“I must complete this task.”
Try:
“I am collecting information.”
Suppose you’re debugging feature extraction.
Even if you discover:
Approach fails
that’s information.
Research progress is often:
Hypothesis eliminated
rather than:
Hypothesis confirmed
What I would try for one week
Every morning write:
Today’s uncertainty
Example:
“I don’t know whether audio features are being skipped.”
What thing I will do in the next 2 hours ? I want to invest some time on the paper and some time on the conceptual map. Conceptual map is a long process and better to spend a short time for it. I will just start today. Then later focus on the paper, so that I can decide what things to discuss with Ma’am tomorrow : Give time to analyze the paper.