Hi guys, just wondering how many "productive" hours on average you have per day? Am I the only one who feels as if they actually get very little done?

B.xx

Maximum 4 hours :-( but most of the time only about 2! But I do end up doing work most weekends and at odd hours so I like to think I do more overall - probably don't though!

Probably around 4 for me too.. some weeks i work really well on every day and get a good 6-8 hours in.. then on other weeks i get bugger all done and end up just faffing all day. I find this PhD malarky is full of peaks and troughs for work productivity.

For my review panel tomorrow I had to produce a timetable of everything I had done since the last panel and how many hours spent on each task! I thought that would be impossible but when I sat down and did it I found it quite easy to see where my time had gone and I was averaging about 40-45 hours a week. There were probably a lot of incidental things which I hadn't even included in that. I was quite surprised to see how much work I had actually been doing as I felt as though I had been slacking a bit - I think my supervisors may have thought so too which is probably why they asked me to do it. I can now justify everything and as I recently found out I am seriously anaemic, I think 40 hours a week is pretty good going.

I also tend to get a lot more done if I come in on a weekend. But can easily spend a Wednesday faffing, moaning and eating.

Though when it came to writing my transfer report, it did seem like I'd done quite a bit.

I think its impossible to think you'll work productively 12 hours a day for 3 years solid. I work pretty productively, but I also work weekends, don't take as muhc holiday as I'm entitled to, and am generally thinking about my PhD and working it over in my head most of the time (I hope I'm not the only one!)