Hours per week workload for 3 credit hour of PhD dissertation research work

[Cheerful]

Dissertation work should consume as many hours as possible per week while balancing other demands and personal well-being.  Basically, dedicated PhD students don't have much of a life outside dissertation work -- while maintaining some life balance, including family life and tending to personal well-being.  Good time management ensures ability to take much-needed down time away from the dissertation. 

You either want to finish the PhD in a timely manner or you don't.  Those who don't sometimes feel comfortable/secure hanging out in the PhD program for as long as possible, often in an effort to delay scary entry (or re-entry) into the "real world."

[Caracal]

Dissertation work should consume as many hours as possible per week while balancing other demands and personal well-being.  Basically, dedicated PhD students don't have much of a life outside dissertation work -- while maintaining some life balance, including family life and tending to personal well-being.  Good time management ensures ability to take much-needed down time away from the dissertation. 

You either want to finish the PhD in a timely manner or you don't.  Those who don't sometimes feel comfortable/secure hanging out in the PhD program for as long as possible, often in an effort to delay scary entry (or re-entry) into the "real world."

I have to disagree. First of all, there are times when the benefit of more hours put in starts to wear off. When I'm writing, I can't just sit there and churn stuff out for 8 hours. At some point, I just stop being productive. Now, sometimes it could work to write for a couple hours and then move on to some other dissertation task, but writing tends to fry my brain and if I can get in a good, solid 3 hours of writing in a day, and there's nothing else really pressing, it can be much better for me to take the rest of the day off and come back tomorrow fresh. The same is true of research. Actually, one of the great things about researching at archives is that they usually close at 5 and you can just go back somewhere, eat some food and drink a beer.

All this stuff is discipline specific and time specific. I gather that in the sciences sometimes you just need to be in the lab a lot to run experiments. There are also times when long hours can help. When I'm editing work, I just need to keep at it and do it for as long as I can.

But, I think the basic premise here is wrong. I took longer than I wanted to to finish my dissertation, but the problem wasn't that my hours weren't long enough. The thing that delayed me is that I had long refractory periods where I wasn't getting much done at all. The people I knew who moved along fastest weren't people who spent evenings in the library and had no life outside of their work-those people actually made rather slow progress-they had too many projects going on, or they kept producing work that their advisors weren't happy with and didn't seem to ever make the changes required.

The people who did the best mostly were the ones who had a consistent schedule. They were there at work by 9 or 930, they worked till 5 and then they left-sometimes for the bar.

As a general rule, whenever someone tells me that to succeed in anything, I need to not have much of a life, I stop paying attention. Whatever follows is likely to not be very helpful.

[Hibush]

I think long hours are a symptom of fast progress, not an underlying cause. Correcting the problem requries getting at the cause.

Let's say someone is struggling because they are collecting bad data or developing untestable models, causing them frustration, which in turn make them work less. Forcing them to double up on the wasted time in the lab doesn't help at all. I think this exact scenario plays out a lot.

On the other hand, if someone has chosen to investigate an important problem, and are excited about knowing the answer, they are likely to spend a lot of time trying to find it.
In addition, if they have designed their research approach so that it is productive and produces consistent meaningful results, they will be eager to do that next experiment.

The key is how they decide which problem to address, and choose one that can be productively studied. If someone is not spending enough time in the lab, as PI, I'd work on those two decisions and let the hours play out. That requires the PI to be a good mentor, not a timekeeper.

[Vkw10]

I don't think credit hours are relevant here-- they are just place holders to make a student "full time" while they are completing their dissertation.

Every where I've worked credit hours for a Ph.D. student fell into two categories. First, the actual courses they had to take, which could usually be used to award a master's. Second, dissertation hours which met administrative requirements that they be enrolled in order to have access to campus resources, especially library databases, and to demonstrate that we were meeting our teaching load requirements. If they weren't funded, dissertation hours also were a means to extract tuition from them, but my departments never admitted unfounded Ph.D. students. Credit hours had no relevance to hours spent in lab, library, archives, field sites, etc.

[jerseyjay]

For what it is worth, I did my first two years of doctoral work (in history) at a university in the United States. I earned more than 30 credits,  and took some courses that later proved to useful when I began teaching, wrote one seminar paper that in the end turned out to be a chapter in my dissertation, but I didn't think I was making any progress towards earning a PhD. So I dropped out.

After dropping out, I moved to Britain, and finished my degree in three years. For about a year I was a TA in my advisor's intro course and went to department seminars, but apart from that had no responsibilities to the department. I worked catch-as-catch could (not having a British passport), then after about two years I moved back to the U.S. to finish up my dissertation. By then I had got married (no children) and was teaching as an adjunct more or less full-time (as many as three different schools a week). In the British system (at least where I was) a doctoral degree is a research degree and there are no courses, and hence no credits. You're not really supposed to work full time when doing it, but I wasn't the only one who did, given the high cost of living where we were.

I finished my degree more or less on time. One reason is that I liked my subject. Another reason is that I was constantly working on it--not exclusively--but constantly. This included reading secondary literature, going over primary sources, and trying to write at least an hour a day. Some days I spent more time and some days less.

The people I know who did not finish had various issues. Some just didn't like their topic and found something, anything, else to do. Some got better paying jobs along the way (which is not difficult). Others burnt themselves out. Others became disenchanted with academia.

By definition somebody who doesn't finish does not do "enough" work, but I am not sure the fundamental issue  was a lack of work. Nor did I meat anybody for whom it was a lack of talent. Mainly, a lack of motivation or a lack of interest or a realization that, unlike a BA, not finishing the doctorate would probably not mean anything negative in their life except not having a PhD. (In fact, many of the people who did not finish their doctorates were probably and happier and more successful than people who did.)

[Parasaurolophus]

For the last six weeks before I submitted, I put in 12-14 hours a day, 5 days a week. That was one of the worst six weeks of my life--it was wholly unsustainable, and it left me burned out. Sprints like that might sometimes be necessary, but they mostly aren't, and you can't realistically expect that to be the norm.

Today, I teach at least eight courses a year and now I have a small child at home. 40-60 minutes a day goes into research (almost never all in one chunk), and I still outpublish all the professors in my PhD program, with the exception of my supervisor. Most of my waking hours are devoted to childcare and housework. I definitely don't work a 40-hour week, but I still get nominated for teaching awards and I'm well-known in my subfield. So: the quality of my work has not suffered overmuch. Now, I'm luckier than most in my circumstances at the moment, but the point is just that "success" needn't require you to kill yourself working. It does require you to work consistently and efficiently, however.

[Caracal]

For the last six weeks before I submitted, I put in 12-14 hours a day, 5 days a week. That was one of the worst six weeks of my life--it was wholly unsustainable, and it left me burned out. Sprints like that might sometimes be necessary, but they mostly aren't, and you can't realistically expect that to be the norm.

Today, I teach at least eight courses a year and now I have a small child at home. 40-60 minutes a day goes into research (almost never all in one chunk), and I still outpublish all the professors in my PhD program, with the exception of my supervisor. Most of my waking hours are devoted to childcare and housework. I definitely don't work a 40-hour week, but I still get nominated for teaching awards and I'm well-known in my subfield. So: the quality of my work has not suffered overmuch. Now, I'm luckier than most in my circumstances at the moment, but the point is just that "success" needn't require you to kill yourself working. It does require you to work consistently and efficiently, however.

Yeah, these are all good points. There's also a tendency for all of us to overgeneralize from our own makeup and work habits. There are people out there who can regularly work 80 hour weeks. In the absence of other responsibilities, some people may not mind this. That's fine, but I think it is important not to set that as the norm. When you do, you end up reducing the diversity of the profession, not only in terms of gender, race and background, but also of ways of approaching topics and creativity.

[AvidReader]

[. . .] I moved to Britain, and finished my degree in three years. For about a year I was a TA in my advisor's intro course and went to department seminars, but apart from that had no responsibilities to the department. [. . .] In the British system (at least where I was) a doctoral degree is a research degree and there are no courses, and hence no credits. You're not really supposed to work full time when doing it, but I wasn't the only one who did, given the high cost of living where we were.

I finished my degree more or less on time. One reason is that I liked my subject. Another reason is that I was constantly working on it--not exclusively--but constantly. This included reading secondary literature, going over primary sources, and trying to write at least an hour a day. Some days I spent more time and some days less.

The people I know who did not finish had various issues. Some just didn't like their topic and found something, anything, else to do. Some got better paying jobs along the way (which is not difficult). Others burnt themselves out. Others became disenchanted with academia.

I also did my degree overseas in a humanities field, and this aligns exactly with my experience, except I tended to take weekends off completely. I did treat it like a job: I worked from 8 or 9 to 5 or 6 most weekdays, took about 2 weeks off each year, and finished in 3 years. A few people in my program took 4 years, and a few left along the way, mostly for the reasons jerseyjay mentions.

AR.