There seem to have been a few posts recently about working hours and the BBC have printed a story about how working over 11 hours a day is a bad thing, may be of interest to some ...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-12961179

yeah, I heard this on the radio this morning. I reckon I'm ok, because although I'm technically at my computer all day, I spend at least 10 out of 11 hours procrastinating :p

IMO if you are regularly working 11 hours a day then, frankly, you are quite shit at the PhD thing.

agreed, I average 9 hours a day depending on procrastination time
:p

======= Date Modified 05 Apr 2011 20:17:58 =======
When I was a full-time student I viewed my PhD as a 9-5 job, so stuck to those hours. I'd get into work about 8.15, to get parked, then would surf the Internet (early days of it!) for a while before 9, then get started properly. Come 5pm I would leave.

My husband took the same approach when he started (and completed) a full-time PhD too.

Now of course later as a part-time PhD student (and successfully completed) I was, for much of the time, managing on no more than 5 hours total a week. Not to be recommended. But I don't believe people need to put in vast amounts of hours. A lot can be wasted procrastinating. A lot can be achieved in much less time.

That depends on the nature of your research!  It doesn't quite work like that with lab based experiments - these are time consuming especially when they don't go to plan and you have to redo them! It's very time consuming process which says more about your standard of research as good science is often laborious with careful attention needed as repeatability is a key goal! 

;-)

ya completely agree with doodles if your in a lab based phd such as molecular biology/life sciences then its impossible to take a 9-5 approach and its more common than not to work 11+hour days. As if you decide to take the 9-5 approach in my opinon then the quality of your research is going to suffer as you wont be able to fit in all the quality control experiments and experimental repeats to make results robust. not to mention find time to read the litreature, evaluate the research, pour over vast quantities of information on genome/proteome databases, design experiments etc. I am often envious of PhD students in other disciplines who can take weekends of and take the 9-5 approach but I knew what I was getting into before i started so I cant really complain. Also I come from a farming background so ive been working long days for most of my life so i guess if the bbc story is true then im in trouble. :)