I’ve completely revised my thesis strategy. Before I had hoped to make incremental progress: 2-4 solid pages a day of material I was happy with and would constitute a solid draft. Now I’m just wholesale copying chunks from papers I’ve written in the hopes of getting a handle on what holes I need to fill and how best to organize everything. I started feeling like writing my thesis was a zero-sum game where the payoff is my ability to think; every lemma I finalized in the text took away one potential lemma that I could prove about new and exciting problems. The new method means more tedious proofreading and checking later, but at least I have a sense of the big picture. Of course, now my pages vs. time graph is going to look strictly concave instead of linear, so as long as I stop thinking Δpages = progress it should all work out.