...and another thing along the same lines

I work part time.

I have a part time job and a part time PhD. I get to spend 2 or 3 days a week on my PhD, Monday and Tuesday every week and a Friday every other week. I work between 24 and 30 hours on 3 and a half days. I work every second Saturday which means that every two weeks I have a whole weekend off. And weekends are sacred, no matter what people say about a PhD. Maybe if I was more enthusiastic about it I would be more inclined to spend my time off on it.

I love my job. It ticks all the boxes. It's interactive, it's productive. I get to work hard or at least try to. But the fact that I do both on a part time basis means I cannot fully engage in either. Monday and Tuesday I have to keep my head free for my PhD, Wednesday and Thursday my job demands my attention regardless of how dissatisfied I am with my PhD output. Every other Friday I get to go back to the chaos of my PhD but then on Saturday that doesn't matter anymore.

There's too much to and fro at the moment. I virtually start from scratch every time I go to the office and if I'm at work my head's not completely there because I'm still ruminating about my PhD - and I make mistakes, and my consistency goes down and this stresses me out and I make even more mistakes! I love my job, but if I'm not good at it, there's no point doing it.

So do I give up my job temporarily (which I have the option to) and go for the next 6 months without the sanity saving productivity and interaction of work, or do I give up my PhD. I really don't know

Laying bare

I don't like talking about my PhD.

I don't like talking about my PhD and it's taken me a long time to figure out why this is so.

You have to know that I have struggled practically from day 1. I know, everybody struggles during their PhD, but not everybody is also trying to pick up their life from practically rock bottom during their PhD. I am and I have been from the start. Sometimes things went well, sometimes things went bad, and sometimes they've changed my viewpoint on things that happened, things that I've done in the past. But always I struggled to fulfill the necessary work for my PhD.

Sure, my struggles aren't the machinations of some evil PhD force, but arguably a culmination of factors, some of which purely of my own making; I'm not particularly good at self-discipline and I haven't exactly gone out of my way to change that, I hate stress, particularly stress created by a lack of productivity and I don't like confrontation. Instead I avoid, compulsively. And I satisfy myself with things that are more immediately gratifying and at least make me feel like I've done something - in short, I procrastinate. I play computer games, I watch online streams and I brows the internet. I waste time and all the while I am aware of the time I'm not spending with learning the things I need to know, acquiring the knowledge I don't have (instead of moping about not having it) and achieving success in my PhD.

I am painfully aware, that because I'm not focusing on my PhD my head's not with my studies and as a result, I have no ideas, I'm not motivated to work because I constantly "start from scratch" and I have basically no excuse for not working. I should be doing the work and if I can't I should find a way to do the work.

I need to be more proactive, as a PhD student I need to be proactive; be my own boss! I know this, but I've never been proactive. Not that this cannot be changed and I'm not trying to make excuses here, but I know this to be true. I am also aware that this is an amazing opportunity for me and that I shouldn't be wasting it (I try to keep these thoughts out of my head as much as possible, because they serve no positive purpose, but they are nevertheless a reality).

But like I said, I don't like talking about my PhD. I don't like talking about my PhD because I invariably reflect on the realities of my shortcomings. I know these need to be addressed rather than ignored, but it's one thing to know them and another to acknowledge them. It stresses me out.

But I've found there is a very simple reason why I don't like talking about my PhD. One that completely bypasses all the problems I have just listed, all the struggles, worries and pains of a PhD student.

I don't like talking about my PhD because if I do engage in a serious discourse on the matter I might find that I should really just stop doing my PhD, and that prospect scares the crap out of me.

It scares the crap out of me because I would have to acknowledge that I have wasted the last three years, that I have wasted a fantastic opportunity, wasted the continued moral and financial support that my parents are unquestioningly providing and that I will have to justify that to them. I will have wasted the support that both my supervisors and anyone else at my university or in other places have given me. And I will have nothing at the end of it.

So I plod on,  I try but halfheartedly, because this PhD completely lacks the interactivity which engages and satisfies me completely in other activities, I procrastinate because going "cold turkey" on the things I enjoy in my spare time (and in which I admittedly indulge too much in) would be like ripping my heart out and making me carry on without it, and I wait for the days I spend working in a shop which at least makes me feel like I'm making a difference, like I'm bring productive, and that there's something I'm good at.

Yes sure, I need help. I'll get help. I'm in the process of getting help. But help's not good if I don't know what I need help with, what I want help with and what I want there to be at the end of it. It's alright for people to keep saying "you need to finish your PhD" and "you've done so much of it, you might as well go all the way", but that's brought me nothing so far and it's not going to start helping me anytime soon. It's an easy answer that doesn't solve anything, provide any help. Yes, I need to make up my mind about what I really want, but nobody ever tells you how difficult that is! It's all "you need to know what you want" and "nobody can make up your mind for you". It's not as simple as that! It certainly isn't in an insular PhD environment where everyone just expects you to get on with things.

Scheduling

It's been a while, and honestly I feel not much further. By the looks of things my first post isn't even accessible anymore.


Right, so here's what I'm going through: I'm meant to come up with a schedule for my PhD and I've never done something like this before. Not the PhD I mean, but the schedule. It's March 2011 now and the University expect me to graduate in July 2014 (normal part time PhD duration).


I have 41 months, how do I divide them?


I've got an idea about what chapter need to go in it - well, the basics anyway, and I don't think I need to know more. I've also still got a fair bit of data collection to do and round up; then pre-analysis, which is where I find out whether any of it is of any use; and then Extracting all the useful bits, code them and analyse them.
All this has got to be done and I feel daunted. but I think more so I feel daunted about writing this schedule!


The pressure's already building up again even though I felt really good yesterday about making changes to my life (which I'm blogging about on Headlights, another one of my blogs (is it good practice to have multiple blogs? Is it good practice to have brackets within brackets?))
I'm already feeling like procrastinating again.


How can I know how long something is going to take???