In these last few days there is very little useful revision/preparing that you can do. The best thing you can do is to look after yourself as well as possible. Sleep as much as you can. Have fun. Do relaxing things. Try not to worry. And don't do last minute cramming. You won't take it in, and will just worry yourself further in the process.

Good luck for Wednesday!

My external examiner was confirmed 2 months before I submitted. My internal changed after submission though. I didn't pay it any attention in my writing up. I also totally failed to read my external's recent (tangentially relevant) book :$ But just refer to them as you would any other academic in your references. Don't stress over them, or give them undue weight. Although it is a good sign if you have - naturally - read and referenced some of your external's work. I found I had done that without trying, including her PhD thesis which I'd looked at early on in my PhD.

I have a very low pressure limit, but I'm not working in academia, and am long-term ill with a progressive neurological disease. During my part-time PhD I got extremely good at saying no to things. I focused on what I needed to do to complete the degree, and increasingly so as I became more and more disabled.

My husband (also has PhD) is a Research Fellow at our local university and he has quite a high pressure job, but he seems to manage it. He's juggling a lot of different research projects, with a high degree of responsibility. But it seems to work out ok, and he chills out at home in evenings and at weekends. His job is very much a 9-5 one and he turns his back on it out of hours.

Of course you are under an incredible amount of pressure at the moment, in these final weeks as you try to finish your thesis in record quick time. But the pressure should ease afterwards, and I would honestly expect a post-doc/fellowship to be easier than you're finding things right now.

Some very good advice already, such as to leave the chapters you've done alone, and stop fiddling with them. I would also recommend going cold turkey on Google scholar and reading online journals. At this stage you need to focus on writing up what you have done, not summarising other people's work.

I personally didn't find timetabling helped at all. I could never stick to a timetable and found it totally demoralising. Instead I would break down what needed to be done, focusing on a chapter or two at a time, and draw up a list of sub-tasks. Really small things that I could concentrate on and wouldn't intimidate me. Then I would start tackling the most appealing (or least unappealing?!), do that, cross it off my list, and move on to the next. That way I found I was making progress and my confidence grew.

It maybe helped as well that I was working in very restricted circumstances. I had to work in 1 hour chunks, spread throughout the week, having no more than 5 hours total a week to work in. But I got through, I wrote up my thesis and passed my viva with trivial typo corrections. So it can be done.

But stop surfing the scholarly journal sites. They are not remotely helpful at this stage!

The access used to be valid for some time after finishing the course, but in my recent experiences it's ended very quickly afterwards. I think the OU IT people are clamping down on people having access still who shouldn't.

The OU method is great, but the online access only applies for the duration of your course. So once it finishes your library logins and access to electronic journals will immediately cease.

I am currently studying an OU art history course, and get access through that too. I also benefited from it during my conversion to history BA(Hons) which I studied with the OU. But the courses are quite expensive, so it's not necessary an ideal solution.

Are you sure you can't publish without a university affiliation? It's very common for people to publish that way in my field (humanities - specifically history). I sent in 2 journal papers in the autumn (after finishing my PhD) without any affiliation, just giving my home address and home contact details. I got my research fellowship later on, and they were accepted anyway.

What field are you in?

Shame about the falling out. I specifically asked my deparment (via my ex-supervisor) if I could get an Honorary Research Fellowship. Joining the library as a graduate member wouldn't have been enough: it wouldn't have given me any access to electronic journals, and many of the jojurnals are only available electronically in uni libraries now. This is the case at both local uni libraries for me, and I'm already a life graduate member at one (am a graduate of both local unis), but have no electronic database/journal access. But the Fellowship (which was granted) has given me library access + full computing access, including to the electronic resources. Which I can access from home.

My Fellowship was just for a year but I'm going to ask if it can be extended. The purpose of it was to help me convert my PhD thesis into more journal papers. I already had 2 during my PhD. I have had 2 more accepted recently (including 1 in the most eminent journal in my field), have 2 more in review, and am working on 2 more. So it's going well enough that I think I will be able to make a case for a fellowship extension. And every published paper that says I'm an HRF of the specific department adds to their reputation.

I can't work in academia due to severely disabling progressive neurological disease. I don't know how long I'll be able to do very part-time research/publishing, hence trying to do as much ASAP.

Agree that there's been lots of fantastic advice already. I personally found the writing up phase the worst by far. I loathed it from beginning to end! But I would keep going, by breaking things down into small achievable tasks, writing to-do lists based on that, and then picking them off in order of least unappealing. That way I would make progress and build my confidence. It's easy to view the writing up as a massive task that you don't know how to tackle or start. But if you break it down into small sub-tasks it's much more manageable, and will get done.

Good luck!

I wouldn't fully justify my text until I considered the draft virtually finished. Until then it's a nice raggedy mess in progress :p

Since your funding is tied to your original individual research project proposal then it could have been difficult to change, if your funding body objected. But since they seem to have agreed in principle I don't see what the problem is. Yes your supervisor probably won't like it, but you're going to have to face up to that. So speak to them sooner rather than later about this. The fact that you've already contacted the research council to sound them out goes in your favour.

My thesis was short (10,000 words below departmental lower limit), and mostly qualitative. I think I wrote far too concisely ...

Sorry, that probably doesn't help :$

Just signing up now. It asks you to either specify your uni + department OR to tick an independent researcher box. Excellent!

Ok great. I'll poke around the site a bit more. Thanks for the prod!