Hi, shikshake. Next month my PhD will complete six years (+2 of the "regular" 4 years). I still have to evaluate my proposal (finish planning details, invite experts and perform case studies). I am exhausted. I have published 3 papers as first-author, but none of them is actually my core thesis. My graduate program requires minimum publishing criteria, so I pursued this criteria. You need the thesis and the publications, period. But I have a marriage, one kid before the beginning of the PhD, one kid born on the second year, a pandemic on the fourth and fifth year, the discovery of autism of the second child on the beginning of the sixth year. It is too much for me. I am lazy, I procastinate, I am a news addicted.
But I have a wonderful adviser. She always says "keep working in whatever you can", "write your way out".
It is worth noting that my first two years was spent with a bullying ex-adviser that was more in the business of "filtering" students then properly advising.
In almost every business day of last three years I have made some kind of progress, but it was not enough, I am still late. Every time I open the LaTeX editor, I think about quitting. Anxiety is high. I keep blaming myself for the (lots of) bad decisons I made. When I finally can get away of bad feelings, I produce something. I am capable of building the proposed system, but it is taking longer then I thought.
I really do not know if I will graduate or not. But what it is working for me is this: 0) Revise the thesis scope (or "I really need to do all this?"), 1) write one paragraph or code function at time, 2) keep a lean todo list (only the essencial).
I keep battling because I really need to finish the PhD, as I also think you need. Just write one new paragraph. Or code a tiny feature. After that, start again: a new paragraph/code. Will we finish the thesis before the final deadline? Who knows. But at least we worked until the last day as much as we can. If we (and I hope we don't) fail, I am sure that battling until the very end will make a huge difference in how we deal with the failure.