I traveled last week so I could not write much... however airports are so boring that you can write to kill time!

So I wrote 8 pages, to get a total of 94 pages.

My adviser is quite depressed because now he will have to read this and give me some feedback. So I stopped writing now.

He also told me that the default style that comes with the LaTeX book environment is nto the one I should use. A friend of mine gave me his style sheet, which enlarges margins etc. So the total dropped to 78 pages.

Thank you guys for your support!

My progress report for today and yesterday: I finished to write the "basics" of this chapter, where I explain what the problem is, why it is important, why previous attempts to tackle it failed, what my approach is, why it is better than all the previous ones, and how I will save the world ;)

Now "all" I have to do on this chapter is to present the results. I have 82 pages now. I wrote 7 pages today and 5 pages yesterday.

I was hoping I could finish it by the end of this week, but I think is will not make it.

======= Date Modified 03 Jun 2009 18:34:44 =======
Hi,

I started writing my dissertation about a month ago. I don't do it full-time so that I don't get bored with it, and in the meantime I can work on other papers. Besides, I have to travel abroad and prepare some presentations and live demos of my work that sometimes keep me away from writing during several days. I am supposed to defend my thesis by the end of September, which will make me submit my dissertation before Aug. 1st (French procedure...).

My adviser told me to write at least 2 pages every day. I try to stick with this goal, and so far it worked quite well. No matter how long I procrastinate before writing anything, no matter how slowly words come out of my keyboard, I do not leave my office before my pdf file is longer than the day before by at least 2 pages.

At first I took a scratch document, put all the chapter and section titles (2 pages per chapter), a table of contents (two more pages), and ended up with 19 pages of (almost) blank pages. Then I started writing my at-least-two-pages on daily basis, which appeared to be more 3 to 5 pages a day. I write until I am bored with writing.

Two weeks ago I submitted a chapter to my adviser. He reviewed it, and explained me that my writing method was wrong. Then he spent a lot of time with me reviewing the successive drafts I sent him, reading the improvements, helping me through this iterative process. I have to say that I am very lucky on that point. While I was working on this chapter the page count did not increase a lot, since I was mostly re-writing sections and re-arranging the order of some paragraphs.

A couple of days ago I started working on another chapter. Today I have 71 pages.

I would say it depends on your research field. I am finishing a PhD in computer science, I have published 6 papers and 3 or 4 other ones are in the pipeline. The non-official requirement in my domain is "at least" 1 per year (in France PhDs are supposed to last 3 years, although few people finish in 3 years in my field). In other fields, like algorithmic, they publish 1 paper that corresponds to the idea they defend in their thesis ; a professor in my team did a PhD in algorithmic and everybody was telling him he could graduate as soon as his first paper had been published.

You have to consider several things:
- What is your main goal: do you want a PhD to hang the diploma in your bedroom and have your mom keep pictures of you with a funny hat in her wallet, or do you want a PhD-level position after your PhD? If all you want is to graduate, ask for the requirements of your school. If you want to be able to have access to positions that require a PhD, you will have to have the best resume as possible, which means good references but also good publications. All the other candidates will have at least the required number of publications, the best candidates will have more publications.
- Do you want numerous publications, or do you want good publications? A paper in a good journal / conference generally requires more work than a paper in a lower-ranked conference or workshop. The former will add a line in your resume, the latter will impress more. Maybe you will prefer to work a few more months on something and publish it in a prestigious journal with a good visibility, rather than getting 2 papers accepted in confidential workshops.
- This may be specific to the domain I am working on, but referencing your work by papers you published gives more weight to your dissertation. When the reviewers will read your dissertation, they will trust the quality of your work more easily if they know your results have been peer-reviewed by the program committee of international conferences.

But don't worry too much: you are only 7 months into your PhD! As it has already been written here, you usually build the "foundations" of your thesis during the first year. You appropriate the subject and make your own vision of the problem, build the first ideas, mature and develop them... if things are going well the first papers generally come during the second year.