I was a part-time student, and funded, but AHRC is AFAIK a bit unusual in funding people part-time. I also got a stipend in the last 18 months of my funding, cos they'd changed the rules so part-timers were on more of an even footing with full-timers.

Also my award was direct to me, rather than through a university. That's not normal with other funding councils.

Have you asked your likely supervisor for advice? There are also charitable trusts who can fund people. For example in Scotland we have the Carnegie Trust. Maybe there's something similar for Wales? But then again they tend to fund full-time only too.

Formatting and biblio were fine and very quick for me, even though I did the latter manually.

But if you have to finish lots of footnotes you're going to need to allow a lot of time for that. Fortunately all of my 500+ footnotes were sorted by the time of the last draft I sent my sups.

Don't know, but it would give you more business skills. But, as I said, I don't think doing a PhD would give you a business idea either. You sort of need to find that yourself.

I don't think doing a PhD is going to help you come up with those sorts of ideas. An MBA might be more effective, cheaper, and less time-consuming. It would also give you more of the skills needed to set up and run your own business successfully.

I found the reformatting and preparing the bibliography very quick, even though I was doing the latter manually, without using EndNote or similar to generate it automatically. So don't worry too much about the time needed for that stage. This is assuming you have footnotes/endnotes filled in already of course. I did, and just had to sort out my bibliography to go at the very end.

On the subject of healthy snacks my recent favourite new discovery are WeightWatchers Cranberry & Sunflower Seed Oaty Biscuits. They're really yummy! And there was me thinking they'd taste like cardboard :p

How far away is your viva? If it's a week or more I'd be tempted to send the disk to your examiners.

I included a CD with my thesis, containing databases, but my examiners didn't look at it at all. But at least they had the option.

That's ridiculous. Emails don't need to be replied to immediately, but can be sent and read at people's convenience. Just ignore it and move on.

The last few months are hard. The only way I got through was to knuckle down and worry about small immediate tasks, not the bigger picture, or the viva afterwards. I took it just one step at a time.

And re the MPhil thing, well if you give up and submit for an MPhil you'll have to do an awful lot of reducing to get it to fit the word limit, so would have work to do still. You should give the PhD a go. If you don't you will regret it in the future. And your supervisors could be very wrong. Mine thought the examiners would be very unhappy with my conclusions and would want major rewrites. Not a jot :)

They might ask you about it at a meeting ;-)

We have automatic machines newly installed at my uni library, and also at the one several miles away where I'm a life member. They are used for issuing books, and for returning them, so there is no need to go through librarians at all.

On the downside they are not always so easy to use if you are physically disabled, as I am, so I would probably end up asking a librarian for help anyway! But generally I get my husband to borrow the books for me, so have a workaround :)

That sounds attemptable :) It also leaves time at the end when you've handed in your full draft for final revising/rewriting after supervisor feedback.

Keep the goals flexible. For example if they're realistic some chapters will be finished more quickly, but others will take longer. So a bit of give and take needed.

Good luck!

RA = research assistant. I worked as a research assistant on a relevant project overlapping the end of my part-time Masters and the start of my part-time PhD.