If it makes you feel any better, mine's at the six-year mark.

I planned to write a paper on my own research in roughly 20 hours (thankfully, the research was a group project and shame is an effective motivator for me, so that got done nearly on time, and the delay wasn’t my fault) and it took me about 60 all told. I got the first third done in a few hours, the next third about 15 hours later, and about 40 hours on the last third and formatting the attachments.

The most irritating thing is that I start to become gradually more and more fascinated and simultaneously hopeful and I’ll finish any moment now, every time I write a paper. I start to enjoy investigating the topic so much that I slow down and hyperfocus on details, sabotaging myself while wishing I had started earlier so I could really get into it. I cannot overstate that this happens every time I write a paper and yet I still always procrastinate starting.

I tried to analyze why I was procrastinating this time and the furthest I got was that I knew once I started, I’d fill the remaining time with it like a goldfish growing to fit its habitat, and I didn’t want to do that much work. But I knew that I would enjoy it once I started, so I couldn’t figure out why I was still avoiding it.

I made a partial breakthrough by writing a to do list for the paper and discussing in depth how one even writes a paper with my endlessly patient husband, but that only worked for the second burst.