I’ve just (as in, like, five minutes ago) finished a draft of my dissertation. I thought it would be interesting to look at the history of dissertation.tex, the LaTeX file that represents my last five years of work. Using mercurial, a horribly cobbled together bash script, and the neat linux command line word counting tool “wc”, I made the following plot of how the number of words in dissertation.tex changed over time.
The first couple of days I was just copy and pasting in old papers, so those days look productive but don’t let that fool you. Then for about two weeks I did basically nothing. And then in the last week or so, and mostly in the last two days, I wrote another 10,000 words (well, 10,000 words of LaTeX code). Tl;dr I really should have started working on this sooner.