Can I ask, how many people were offered (or made to attend) instruction on time management skills before embarking on their Phud ?

My faculty offers training courses on time management but they are not compulsory. It is 'compulsory' to do a certain amount of hours of training of various types each year but no-one bothers to check up and when I presented my training diary at my first panel they weren't bothered!
I did attend time management but it was pretty useless as we discussed basic things such as don't spend time on the internet etc etc, all the stuff that you know but still find it hard to do.

My university also offers time management training for PhD students, but it's not compulsory, it's part of the Generic Skills training, and is taken up (if the student decides to do it) after they've started.

I didn't bother. My circumstances regarding time management are rather unusual to start with, and then I reckoned they'd just be telling me obvious things. Plus I was already quite far through the part-time PhD by the time the course was offered. Better for newer starters though.

We are also offered a time management postgraduate course (1 day event), but again, it isn't compulsory.

There is a week long induction session where there are a lot of things discussed, one of them is the about the production of the time plan for the whole of the PhD, which is necessary for the proposal submission, which I suppose gets you going on the planning bit. We have other sessions which people can go to, but these are not part of the formal programme, mostly I think it is acquired by reading books about the PhD process.

i attended my universities (non-compulsory) time management course for postgrads a couple of weeks ago. Ironically, it was a complete waste of time! they made us fill in a timetable of what we had been doing in every half hour time slot for the last week to highlight when we worked best/were most productive etc, which wasn't much use as I already know I am pretty much useless until around 10.30am! we then had to fill in a 'personality' questionaire, and on the basis of that they split us into 2 groups (the planners and the non-planners apparently), and as a group we had to discuss what we felt were our main reasons for wanting to manage our time better. unsurprisingly, both groups came to pretty much the same conclusions: too much work, too little play. great, complete waste of my morning, i could have told them that within 5 minutes and spent the morning doing something more productive instead!

Ironic, isn't it that most time management courses are usually a waste of time!

I attended a two week course at the start of my PhD, and it actually led me down many wrong paths with my research techniques. It also managed to completely miss the practical issues like time management, how to start an academic career etc. My pet hate is the professional development courses, usually ran by academics, which present some quite good information but are padded up in two hours of psychobabble/ice-breaker rubbish.

For time management advice, I would recommend watching Randy Pausch's 'Time Management'.

thanks for sharing!!

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