I'm a part time PhD student so will be doing this over 5 years. My Head of Department (the uni where I work not where I am takign my PhD) has given me objectives linked to my PhD - present at an international conference this year, submit an article to a peer reviewed journal etc (which are fair enough) but he has also said write 10,000 words of PhD (Lit review) before December - is this reasonable? Should I be writing so much this soon? I have' t discussed timetables etc with my supervisors yet (got a meeting this week) but thought I'd canvass views first.
Chris

I'm part-time. I wrote my literature review within 3 months of starting. And I kept writing after that. Writing early will help you a lot later on. Quite frankly it's more important than other stuff like conferences and journal articles.

I agree that the PhD is more important than conferences etc but I am obliged to present at at least one conference and have one publication a year - this is required by my employer whether or not I am doign a PhD.

Ok but if those goals required for your employment, not your PhD, then take it out of your employment time, not the time you set aside for working on the PhD.

I just rechecked my literature review to see how long it was: 11,000 words + 4,000 footnotes. In case that helps. It also included some methodology and plans for the rest of the PhD.

The time all merges into one anyway - I get an allowance of 296 hours a year for PhD time and a bit more for normal research allowance but to be honest it all comes out of weekend and evening time at the moment - I'm hoping that after teaching finishes I'll be able to focus a bit more on PhD.  Trouble is I have children and so summer is when I try to reestablish some family time (I know as PhD student things like holidays are supposed to go by the wayside but as I have frequently said to my Head of Department it is never going to be my no 1 priority in the way it would have been were I 22 and unencumbered by responsibilities) - we have a big family holiday planned this summer around my doing fieldwork in the Rockies which is a way of combining the two.
I did do my MA (part time while working in a non related full time job) and MSc in similar circumstances so i knwo I will manage it (or at least I have to believe I will)

Good luck! There's at least one other part-time student on this board who is studying part-time in a similar arrangement in a teaching/lecturing situation, but I'm not sure if she has children, so relies on the summer to catch up with PhD time.

I got through my PhD on typically just 5 hours a week, so it is possible to manage on very few hours (I recently submitted). But if you can take some regular time during the 9-5 Mon-Fri working week for it, do. Otherwise you'll be constantly burning the candle at both ends, and as you say your family time is very important.

Thanks for the advice - you give me hope that I can get it done without too much neglecting of children (my husband is very supportive which is a godsend). I am trying to do bursts but I'm into the heavy marking time now so don't think I'll get that much done (even though that is what I want to do) - I'm trying to use odd hours here and there to do admin stuff like applying for research permits in National Parks etc which all needs to be done but doesn't add to research output. I've managed to get funding from work to go to a conference in Borneo in April so I'm hoping that I'll make some progress after that.

As far as the writing is concerned I worked out that for my MSc I wrote at least 50,000 word when all the coursework was added to the dissertation) so I should be able to do 10,000 - I'm hoping that I can get some overlap between PhD writing and publication writing.