Hi everyone, I'm a 23 year old 6 months through my PhD. It's so demanding and competitive which is fine but the workload is immense. I can't for the life of me keep organised and this leads to a little bit of lack of motivation. I love my topic but the reading and writing gets overwhelming when everything is all over the place !

Does anyone know of any software or tips to point me in the right direction please?

Can anyone help Laura? What's the tomatoes thing that people find helpful?

It's called Mytomatoes- mytomatoes.com/
It is an online timer so it is helpful for timing yourself through boring and onerous tasks for 25 minutes and then giving you a break for five.

But perhaps by 6 months, you should be looking at making yourself a conceptual map, framework or graphic organiser of your readings and different concepts, areas and questions that relate to your topic. Gliffy is a good online organising tool. You have to think about how your topic is organised by yourself, but you can use gliffy (or something similar) to write up your different areas and to organise them into one very 'pro' looking diagram that you can use as a guide. Another good method might be to createa presi on what you know already (for yourself).

Once you have got your readings somewhat organised into a visual map of the area, you can then isolate aspects of each subtopic and then decide each week, which bit you are going to work on and what needs to be done.

Do you have a research plan in place yet and either a hypothesis or questions that you are testing or researching?

Start unpacking what each question or aspect of your hypothesis consists of or see whether you really have enough research under each heading and where there are areas and gaps.

If you are a reflective creative style thinker, you could just sit down and write every day-a page or so of what you know, what you understand, what you are questioning and any other points of interest. You will find that your mind starts organising things after a while-and the writing will help you map out a narrative version of a pathway.

Invest in some 'how to do a phd' books as well-they really help and go to your supervisor and ask whether he/she thinks what you are doing is okay. Sorry got to go now but hope this is not too confusing...am sure others will add more. Good luck Laura-it is normal to be confused at this stage as well...