Gah, I've failed to meet my writing target for today. I might have managed but a friend who moved to the other end of the country last year just texted to say he's in town unexpectedly and do I fancy going for a drink. Well, it'd be downright rude not to! So that means holding today's target over until tomorrow. Not good. But I need a night off anyway!

Good luck everyone else! And I think things like cleaning an oven count as progress....

ooh, can I join too, please? My goal for today is to get to 5,500 words on my literature review.

I'm only a few months into my PhD so maybe I'll change my mind about this, but I really do think it's worth it, for me. Can't speak for other people, it depends on what you want from the PhD and from your working life I think. Before my PhD I spent 15 years working in a lot of different environments and jobs, and the 'grass is always greener' syndrome is so true - I haven't yet come across any job that didn't have serious downsides. There are downsides to doing a PhD, and downsides to trying to work in academia, but I think we have to measure those against the upsides. There's nothing more soul-destroying than slogging your guts out for something that either doesn't interest you or that just doesn't seem to matter in the grander scheme of things. And one thing about research is that it matters - by definition, we're making an original contribution to the sum of human knowledge, and that alone makes a huge difference, I think. (And hopefully we're all doing research that interests us, at least a little!)

My working life before the PhD consisted of working for low wages (my bursary is a significant pay rise) in a high-stress environment with little control over my own work, with line managers who were significantly less knowledgeable and intelligent than me (that sounds snobby, but it's true). I believed in what I was doing, which is why I stuck it for so long, but I believe in my PhD research, and in the contribution I could make as part of an academic career as well. And even if I can't get an academic job at the end of the PhD, it will have been a privilege to spend three years being paid to pursue a topic that interests me. But that sounds horribly idealistic, I'm sure I'll become jaded and disillusioned with the whole thing, that's what's happened in every other job I've ever held, after all!

Woo, congratulations!

Sounds really annoying, the kind of thing that would make my blood boil when something was said and then niggle away at me at other times. JUst what you don't need to face at home! It sounds to me like she's insecure about her own position - is she struggling with her post-Doc, or having stresses with the academics she works with? It could be that she's feeling under pressure and is kicking you as a reflex to validate herself (she may not even realise she's doing it - or maybe she does?). It doesn't make it any easier or nicer for you to bear, but may explain why she's being like that. I agree with the others who said you shouldn't put up with this - I guess it's a question of how much you value her friendship whether you try to (sympathetically) tackle her issues by talking to her about this, or whether you just find a way to cut her influence on your life, by distancing yourself from her or even, at a last resort, moving out. Hope the situation improves, anyway!

I agree, it's all about finding your own pace and the working method that suits you. I can be really slack sometimes, intending to work all day then finding it's 2pm and I haven't started but just not being able to get going, or deciding at the last minute that I need a day off to do laundry or food shopping or housework or to just watch DVDs. On other days I get the early train (I commute to university in another city) and am at my desk on campus by 8.15 am, and work through to 7pm, only taking occasional short breaks to surf the web or eat a sandwich. Those are really productive days when I feel I'm making real progress, but I've never done more than about three or four of those in a row before I hit a wall of tiredness and have an unproductive day. Some weekends I do no work at all, but other weekends (like this one!) I'm working towards a deadline so treat it just like an ordinary weekday.

I find it's easy to get stressed by comparing myself to other students - even when I arrive on campus at 8.15 am, there are people already at their desks, and at first that freaked me out, made me feel lazy, but I've come to realise that everyone works differently, and we just have to adjust our own pace to our own working methods and the particular stage we're at in the process.

I think mentioning it directly risks bringing whatever the issue is to the forefront again. The fact that you're emailing is a clear enough message that you remember whatever it was and want to move on, I don't think there's any need to say more. But then again, I don't know what the issue is so maybe the details do change what's best to say? I don't know, but my feeling is to go into as little detail as you can ('least said soonest mended' type of approach).

I'd have suggested something like Maria's wording if she hadn't got there first! I think keeping it simple and to the point, and not mentioning the issues from the past, would definitely be the way to play it.

I went to a fairly rubbish state Comprehensive school. Of about 200 people in my year group, six went to university (I was one of those) and another twenty went to Polytechnics (showing my age there!), but the vast majority (including my brother and sister) left school at sixteen and got rubbish jobs or went on to vocational training elsewhere. I was put forward for Oxford but nobody in the entire history of my school had ever been there (1 person got into Cambridge 12 years earlier) so nobody had any idea what I needed to do, and I was intimidated by the whole process, so I flunked the interview. So yeah, it had a big impact - now I'm very relieved that I didn't go to Oxford, I'm very happy with the way my life turned out, but if I'd been at a different school things might have turned out very differently!

I'm the same - I'd never cross a picket line unless I really couldn't avoid it (and I'd do everything I could think of to avoid it). If I had to cross it, I'd stop and speak to people on the picket line to explain why I had to cross and to offer my support to them. It's true, striking is a last resort. I've been on strike three times in my working life (and was shop steward on all three occasions, which does put a different spin on it!) but each time it was only because we absolutely had no other option and it was the last resort when something serious was going on. Striking is a very difficult and costly thing to do. In higher education, the lecturers' and other workers' interests are usually in line with the students' interests anyway - I can't think of any time when pay cuts or redundancies have happened at the same time as better facilities and opportunities for students, or when cuts in student provisions have benefited the staff. And there's the old principle of solidarity as well - after all, if you don't support people when they need support, who's going to be there to support you when you need support?

I'm the same, PamW - the factual bits, like qualifications and previous jobs, can be rattled off pretty quickly, but the other stuff takes a ridiculous amount of time. I'm not sure I've spent 5 hours on one, but tailoring statements to match person specifications takes way longer than I ever expect it to, and has to be done specifically for each job, so when I was in job-hunting mode I did find I sped up a little with each application, but not that much.

Ouch, my sympathies! I have a wisdom tooth that's been trying to come through for a couple of weeks now (it tries this a couple of times a year and never manages to get through...) so I have a little idea of what you're feeling (sounds like your pain's way worse though!). I'm also insomniac so sympathies on the sleep deprivation too, there's nothing makes me more grumpy and less inclined to work than not getting a decent night's sleep. Hope you're better soon!

Good luck, I completed it too, it was interesting to think about my own answers as I was doing it!

My first supervisor is really interested in my subject area but doesn't know much about it, but is an expert in a related field and wants to get into mine. Or so he said at my interview though he hasn't yet actually read any of the literature I've suggested, and I was shocked to find that he hadn't even heard of the main academic in my field despite having major crossovers with his own work! But he's sharp about methodology and about the structure and content of a PhD so I'm hoping that's enough. My second supervisor is from a different slightly-related field, and much less experienced as an academic and as a supervisor, but his knowledge of the literature is closer to my area (though still only a little related), but he's very approachable and chatty and helps me think things through. So neither of them know much about my subject, and I do sometimes wonder if I made a mistake choosing my university, though overall I think it was the right choice. For me, the input they give me on the structure of my research is the key bit, and I'm making contact with other academics within my specialty off my own bat (there's only really 2 in the UK and neither are at my university!!).

I'm a full time PhDer but I don't socialise that much. I'm a little bit older, and live an hour away so tend to only be on campus maybe two or three days a week. Our seating area is huge - maybe 60 or so student desks plus post-docs and admin people in a large open-plan office, with students on a hot-desking system so you don't always sit in the same place (though we all tend to sit at the same small cluster of tables even if not at the same desk every day). There's definitely a big group of students who socialise a lot together, and I'm not part of that, so it can feel like being on the outisde. But I also get to talk to a lot of people who sit in my area of the open-plan office, most of them overseas students, and we have a nice sociable vibe even if it's not extended beyond the office - we don't go for lunch or go out together (well, some do, but only where there's proper friendships between two or three people, not a general thing) but we always have friendly words with each other when we're in the office.

I could be concerned that I'm not part of the main group - I know my character is to stay away from popular crowds and it's something i want to work on in order to be more successful at networking and more easy in social situations with other academics - but to be honest, I just can't be bothered. To my mind, none of this is about popularity - if my research is interesting and I show interest in other people's research, then I'll make the contacts I need, and I have friends outside academia for everything else...