I am avoiding looking at such guidelines until I have all of my chapters as I know that I will just overwhelm myself then lose motivation! Currently on my final findings chapter and 7 months until submission.

Thank you- I believe in you too! :D My sup has encouraged me to send out prospective applications as soon as April :o not sure if I will get around to it though. Oh and don't get me started on publications haha I recently had my second lot of major corrections on an article that was based on my MA thesis that they want back by June...but everything is so busy constantly! I submitted something from my PhD months ago to but it is still under review. I have told myself further publications can be worked on when I have my full draft submitted. Anyway, wishing you good luck with the writing :)

Is anyone taking the Bank Holiday weekend off? I am allowing myself a long weekend if I hit the quarter-way point of this findings chapter tonight!

Thank you Hugh; I got enough done to convince myself that I deserve a lazy weekend ;) Just finishing up some reading with a beer!

Speaking of reading, I was always advised that there is a time in your PhD when you must stop reading and just write- though, I feel like I constantly need to keep reading recently published work in my field and acknowledging it to avoid issues in the viva. Do you find yourself doing this?

Well done! Hope you have a super weekend :)

Yes, I have to keep looking at literature too. I haven't actually formally written up my literature review, though I have obviously referred to literature in my discussions in various chapters. It was left towards the end because my field is still evolving. It does make it challenging, because I'm going to have to keep going back and updating discussions that I had written a good while back with up to date literature. There's also the fear of missing something. Tbh I skim read papers and pick out and copy what is relevant to me into a separate document, and then concentrate on the relevant parts only.

Oh, the literature review/how much to read seems like a bit of a minefield! I wrote a literature review in my first year, and am leaving it pretty much til the end to update, so that I'll be able to go back over papers without having too many other tasks still in the way (that's the theory, anyway!). I think that as long as you make it clear that you only reviewed papers up to a certain cut-off date, it doesn't matter if something spectacular came along after that date. My problem is that I wasn't very systematic with my initial gathering of the literature, and followed trails of stuff that interested me rather than going through all the results for my key terms, so I think I have some plodding literature searches still to do!

Anyway - hope you all have a good Easter weekend :)