Hello everybody, here is something that has worried me since the beginning of the PhD study. Dealing with guilt for not working enough or not working in the right direction has been very difficult for me and I am sure I am not alone in this. So, I wonder if there are things that anybody has done to fight with this guilt. Have you found something that proved to be effective? Share the wisdom, I assume lots of us need it (or am I the only one? )

All the best,
Ulysses

hi ulysses
I had a bit of a problem with this when i first started too, as it's difficult to know how much you 'should' be doing when you are just starting out. what i did was talk to my supervisor about ow he felt i should be working and discussed my ideas for what i would like to do with him. he gave me basic 'office' hours and said that thats the minimum i should be working, if i got my work dont in that time then great, if not then i'd have to work more. I set myself little deadlines of when i wanted things done by, and eventually through trial and error i figured out how long it takes to do various things and could modify my plans etc. but generally, if you have something you want/need to get done, set yourself a time limit, and work towards that, like, if you're reading on a certain topic, give yourself the say to red and make notes on 4-5 papers. then when you've read enough to get a feel for the topic, give yourself a week to write a report on it, and see if you need to read more after that, or if you should take a different route etc. it's hard to say without knowing what field you're in, but think of what you want to do within your phd, then break that down into years, months, and eventualyl you'll get a feel for how much work you need to get done in a week or a month and go from there!
Hope that helps!

Guilt is the price you pay for sanity.

It's important to not work as well as work. The benefit of not working is sanity. The cost of not working is the guilt you feel.

When i way it up, the benefits far out-weigh the costs. Sanity makes you happy, life's about trying to be happy.

I struggled a lot with guilt a lot in my first year. Since then, I've become all about the lists. I give myself a set number of tasks to do every day (even if very small) and I try my best to get them done. Anything non-vital which I don't do can be added on to the next day. That way I feel like I'm slowly getting through everything that needs done and I'm not plagued with guilt when I go home at the end of the day.

Sometimes I think part of a phd is learning to live with guilt. The billions of things you 'should' be doing or being at the one time, despite being impossible we still feel guilty. I think goals and rewards are certainly a good way to deal with it in terms of time spent/ work accomplished. Also means you can do the things you like guilt -free because you've earned them, which keeps you sane.