Nice personal infographic….but what did you learn from it?

Edit: PhD was in computer science.

All data collected and graphs created in Google Sheets. Graphic created in Adobe Illustrator. Dates are in day/month/year format.

I spent three and a half years working on my PhD and decided before I started that I wanted to track my time. I'm glad I did because about four months in, I was very seriously considering quitting, and the thought of throwing away four months of data is partly what kept me in it.

I categorized my time by:

• Writing: self-explanatory I hope; writing, rereading my work, and revising.
• Administration and Troubleshooting: reading and writing emails, filling out university forms and whatnot, and troubleshooting involving downloading and installing software.
• Teaching Prep and Grading: preparing for lessons and grading student work; also includes time spent uploading grades to the online portal.
• Teaching: time spent teaching and did not include time spent talking to students after class.
• Data Prep, Planning, Analyzing, and Experimenting: planning data format before collection, collecting data, cleaning data, planning experiments, executing experiments, and analyzing experiment data.
• Coding: writing, deleting, and troubleshooting code.
• Research: reading and taking notes from journal articles and other sources.
• Meeting: meetings with supervisors, the wider department, and other colleagues.
• Learning: doing formal online courses as well as informal tutorials; there was one in-person class I took that was counted here (it was only two hours I believe).
• Presentation Prep: creating slides and practicing
• Conference: any time spent at a conference including attending presentations and networking. 
• Presentation: formal presentations; includes time spent answering questions afterward.

Note that my contract stated that I was to work from the office for 35 hours a week. Covid changed that and allowed me to work from home.

Some interesting things I found from visualizing everything:

• The vast majority of my time was spent writing
• I was most productive in terms of my own research when working from home as opposed to working from the office
• Time spent preparing for lessons and grading did not decrease as much as it should have each year, although this is partly because I was assigned to different classes each year
• Wednesday was my most productive weekday while I spent more time working on Tuesdays
• When I did do work on the weekends, it was more likely to be administration work, teaching prep or grading, or presentation prep.
• I did not spend anywhere near the amount of time in meetings as it felt at the time.

Ultimately, I enjoyed this project. I don't know how indicative my experience was of a typical PhD experience, but it may be helpful for those considering a PhD in Europe.

If you've done something similar during your own studies, please link it as I'd be super curious to see it for comparison's sake.

See my comment! I had some assumptions beforehand, like what days I was most productive on. I also thought I spent the same amount of time working on WFH vs office days, but it turns out that they were very different.

Alright, doc, what’s your PhD in? (Congrats!)

Thanks, it was in computer science.

Oh ok! I didn’t see that. I love data. 😂

Man, this is absolutely amazing! I love data, and infographics especially. Manipulating and comparing all this data will keep me entertained for hours!

Just because you spend more time on one category, were you as productive? I’m just inserting in office vs wfh. Sometimes collaboration between two people is more productive in person as opposed to over the internet. Just wondering.

And, did you keep a log in the computer or was it handwritten and then entered later?

Would have been neat to put sleep, washroom breaks, eating, downtime, etc. on it too.

I honestly don’t mean this as a dig, but I’m surprised by how little time you spent doing research and learning compared to other things.

Also where in the world did you get your PhD? Or is it pretty common to get a PhD in three years in CS regardless of where you studied?

way too many words for a viz.

edit: this is a viz. not your thesis haha but anyhow, great work and gratz

Not a dig at all, I myself am a little surprised. I did my PhD in France where PhD in every field (to my knowledge) are funded for three years max. You do have a possibility of adding an extra year, but you have to apply for that and explain to your doctoral school why you aren't going to finish in time.

PhDs in France are more like jobs where you are expected to show up with most of the skills already.

I kept a log in almost real-time (e.g., after a meeting or a stint of work, I'd enter in the time).

I agree that my conclusion that working from home was more productive is not as strong as it should be. Because I was timing myself, I tried as hard as I could to stay focused while the stopwatch was running. So aside from meetings and teaching, I don't think my productivity varied minute by minute between WFH and office.

If I had a better way of measuring productivity, then I'd use that. For what it's worth, most of my writing time was at home.

Fair, I probably don't need so many explanations. Criticism taken on board!

Ah ok I understand! Thank you for the reply.

How much time was spent tracking this is data? 😉

Congrats on the PhD!

Thanks! And not that long. Maybe 30 seconds after I spent a period working on one thing.

This is very aesthetically pleasing. Good job! The tool you picked for visualization was interesting though. Given that your PhD was in computer science, I assumed you would use either R or Python. And just for ease of use, power BI or tableau would be the popular choices to use as well. I’m curious to know why you picked adobe illustrator. I haven’t used it before but I assume it’s a design tool like photoshop? Is it better than BI products like tableau in some way..? And did you use it a lot in your PHD program (which again would be a big surprise for me if you did)

Good question. So to be honest, the answer is because for the last few years, it feels like I've done nothing but code (clearly that is not the case). In another life, I took some graphic design classes and fell in love with it. This wasn't a professional project. I wasn't extrapolating any great insights. It was purely for me. And I wanted to go back to messing around with graphic design tools.

I just feel like home can be distracting and the office can provide more opportunities for collaboration. It sounds like your work was more individual and independent as opposed to collaborative and codependent.

1st: Congratulations on your PhD.

2nd: I have a profound admiration for people that can do what I can't, and this is one of those things. I'm driven by results and utilitarism, and gathering data just in case woudn't do it for me.
Great job!

This is beautiful. Congratulations! But where is the data on time spent crying?

Unfortunately I did not include that time. But I did I have a notes section explaining whether I was WFH that day or in the office, and one of them said "crisis".

I'm impressed you didn't eat, use the bathroom, or sleep at all during the 4 years.

As it says, breaks aren't counted in work time haha.

I’m guessing you came in with your masters completed already?

That’s one large difference between US and EU Ph.D.s In the US you can start straight out of Uni(College) and makes the process takes about 5-6 years in the US

How long did comps prep take you?

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I did not have comps. I basically started on the project right away. At my university, you had to take 100 hours of training, but it didn't have to be formal classes (Udemy courses counted, for example).

Yeah I did, and I'm thankful that I only had to spend 3.5 years on the PhD in total.

Congrats on PhD. But I feel you missed the following categories:

• Crying
• Self loathing
• Arguing with supervisors
• Emailing Supervisors
• staring into a wall
• cleaning to avoid doing work

Or was that just me?

>- Crying - Self loathing - staring into a wall - cleaning to avoid doing work

Sadly, neither of these were productive and so they weren't included, but trust me, there was a lot of time spent here.

>- Arguing with supervisors

This was included in "Meeting". There was a lot of this too.

> - Emailing Supervisors

Included in "Administration". I remember one morning spending an hour and a half writing an email. Not procrastinating, not staring at the screen, actually writing.

Not productive when crying? I’ll have you know some of my best work was done was ugly crying at my computer!!

Love all this though.

I can't fathom how writing would take longer than research. As a chemist, that seems absurd. What did you study?

It is absurd, but the point of the whole PhD is to produce a document, so I tried to remember that in some ways, that was the most important thing. I did computer science.

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>and makes the process takes about 5-6 years in the US

Same for Germany (or at least in German linguistics).

>And not that long. Maybe 30 seconds after I spent a period working on one thing.

Thats really long. It probably added up to multiple days of work (unless you were only doing 2 different things a day, which I doubt.

850 days with 5 periods would be just under 36 hours, which is close to a week of regular work.

True, I hadn't actually done the math.

Wish I did this now it'd be cool to look at. Too late to start now that Im years into the PhD... How did you track the minutes? Did you set certain time blocks to work on x activity? I think I do too much multi tasking to easily do this since I am a wet lab student. While waiting 30 mins for something I might answer emails or do something else. I'm also naturally bad at doing one task at a time so if I get sick of experiment planning or suddenly have an idea for another task I switch to another. I admire your organization and focus. Also very interesting to see a dry lab PhD quantified! The day to day of my dry lab friends are all so different since they don't have to deal with the issues and restraints of biology. Even in the states generally I've seen dry lab students graduate in shorter time frames than wet lab PhDs. However since they have the ability to work anytime without waiting for cells to grow, some of my friends' PIs expect them to work near 24/7. Is this the same for France in your experience?

You could still start now if you want! I basically always worked with a timer or stopwatch running so I could easily track my time.

I admire multitaskers. I would love to be able to do that, but I basically have to only work on one thing at once or I get super overwhelmed.

Definitely not expected to work 24/7 here. Annoyingly, being in the office was very important though. I am not French, I'm American, and during my first year, I occasionally worked from home if I was sick or if I had to wait on a repairperson (sick days aren't a thing in France; you have to get a sick note from a doctor in order to be paid). And people would make such snide remarks insinuating that I wasn't actually working.

I love your mind and this visualization, such an informative infographic, beautifully placed.