Non-academic books are what's keeping me sane! If I don't have a few hours with a non-academic book at the weekend, I feel I've had no time off!

Yes, revisions do take so long. When I put my mind to it, it's no problem at all getting a couple of thousand words down on the screen, but when I read them back a couple of days later, I want to re-write the whole thing. I do think the taking longer to write/fewer revisions approach works better for me, but it also creates a lot of anxiety as, like you, I wrote a schedule that just doesn't take into account how long things actually take me! I'm trying to see the bigger picture and how I'll thank myself for (hopefully) not needing a year of re-writes later!

I sort of worked yesterday but not to any great effect!

Just glanced at the date on my computer and I see it is the last day in May - so much for this chapter being finished by then! How strict are your supervisors with deadlines? Mine is not at all strict and everything is a movable feast and in fact it's only me who sets deadlines (and misses them!). I can't decide if this is a good thing (because some stages of the PhD genuinely do need a lot more time than you think, and it's worthwhile spending the time and getting it to a better standard) or a bad thing (because I've never missed a deadline in my life until now - I would've somehow got it done if it was a proper deadline!).

Good luck with the job application, Zutterfly.

I'm not sure if these are strictly contingency plans or just times when I had to think on the spot, but I'll tell you them in case they are any use! I was using certain questionnaires with a group of people and I noticed that the participants kept telling me about other things that were related to my overall topic but not captured by any of the questionnaires, so I gathered a list of those other items and made up a new questionnaire. I also responded to a mixture of slow and difficult recruitment/participants wanting to talk about a lot of stuff by taking my work in a more qualitative direction, realising I could get richer data from fewer people and work with the participant group that way.

I check things over and over, Hugh. More ridiculously than that, I give them another check after I've sent them! Good luck with whatever you are sending.

One thing I found useful in my summaries was to write down any connections, contradictions etc that I found with other papers I'd read - it helps you to start synthesising them into a review. Another thing I did was to create documents for very early things that might eventually go into chapters, e.g. I've had a 'possible limitations to this study' document since way before I did any studies, which might sound strange, but when I was reading papers I was coming across such relevant discussions of limitations that I thought I should write them down before I forgot them!

Other than that, I wholeheartedly agree with Hugh's suggestion to get your studies underway as early as you can, as data collection issues can be the slowest part of the whole process.

I wrote summaries of papers as I read them - this is certainly helpful as it gives you a shorthand way of checking the main points of papers. I also drafted a literature review in my first year - I find that people have different opinions on how helpful this is, as some people say it changes completely as you go on, but in my case the original literature review is nearly all useful to me now - some of it is getting moved into different chapters of my thesis, but I'm not at all sorry that I drafted it at the time.

I think there has to be an element of trust that you carried out the research you said you did. I ran group sessions with people, for example, and asked them to complete questionnaires - no-one can prove that I didn't just sit at home and complete the questionnaires myself! I think if you keep your own record of the interview as Hugh says, then the examiners can request it if they need to see it.

The start is a good time to try things and figure out systems/ways of working that will be good for you, as others have suggested. I personally tried referencing software but ultimately didn't use it as I found that 'good old fashioned' is the way to go for me! You might also want to look at things like productivity/motivational tools (e.g. My Tomatoes) and look at PhD courses offered at your university - you might find some useful ones. I agree with others about doing some writing early on - your future self will thank you for it!

Thank goodness transcripts don't need to go in an appendix - I have a huge lever arch file stuffed to bursting with transcripts, and that's only one study :)

I guess since a lot of people publish their lit reviews, journal papers are the standard to aim for!

I'm not trying to be critical about everything that's in my lit review - some stuff is in there just to describe the state of play with my field, and I'm being more critical with the parts where I'm identifying gaps or debates that will feature in my data chapters. I'm not sure whether this is 'critical' enough, but I think it would be hard to dig into absolutely everything you read in order to be critical about it.