How to write a PhD Thesis, fast

A wise PhD student (who was done with it) once told me:

Writing a thesis is a one-time thing that have been done multiple time.

That little sentence stuck with me. It reframed the whole ordeal. The thesis is not some impossible monster—it’s just a document. A big one, yes, but still a document. Others have written theirs, and so can you. The “struggle” we PhD students put ourselves through is, in many ways, an artificial one.

Standing on the shoulder of giants

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You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Plenty of people in your lab, department, or field have already written theses. Ask around and collect a few PDFs. Study their structure. Look at how they framed their chapters, how they handled figures, how they introduced their work.

Even better if your university or group has a LaTeX template, use it. Don’t waste time fussing with margins or citation styles, yet. Your job is not to become a professional typesetter. Your job is to explain your research clearly first, and formatting comes second.

Don’t start from scratch

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If you’re reading this on a tight deadline, it might be too late to fully benefit from this advice but for future students: keep writing as you go.

Your thesis is not something separate from your research papers, lab notes, or reports. It is the collection and polishing of all that. Every figure you made, every draft you wrote, every talk you gave¹, all of that is raw material for the thesis.

When I sat down to write, I realized I already had half of it written from the different publications I had made. The introduction of different talks were a great source of figure for my introduction chapters.

Good work environment

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• You can invest in some nice hardware: A good keyboard, a nice headphone. This investment is also a commitment to writing.
• Get to know your tool before hands. If you have written most of your papers in LaTeX, stick to it for the Thesis. If you have to use Word, good luck. Overleaf (unless you pay) won’t be able to scale for the thesis manuscript, I would recommend to write everything locally in your editor of choice
• Get yourself a trusted grammar checker (e.g. Language Tool or Grammarly), and integrate it with your editor.

Have fun

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Yes, writing a thesis can actually be fun. Or at least, less miserable. Here are a few tricks I used to keep myself sane:

• Add Easter eggs. A hidden joke in a figure caption, a sly reference in the acknowledgments—future readers (and you) will appreciate it. If they can survive the proof reading of your supervisors, it’s even better.
• Make your figures beautiful. It’s oddly satisfying to polish that schematic you’ve been dragging through slides for three years. Treat it like digital art, and its not so time wasted “A picture is worth a thousand words” (and you will reuse these figure in your defense)
• Celebrate your weird stats. Word count creeping up? Paragraphs written per day? Those number are rookie numbers, gotta pumps those number up. You can even brag about it your coworkers and relatives are not so pissed of by it.

My experience

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I did it in 8 weeks, not counting a 2 week break for christmas. During this time I was 100% dedicated to it (sometimes even on weekends 🤫) and key part of the success was getting rapid feedback from my supervisors. I wasn’t afra