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.

True, I hadn't actually done the math.

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.

>- 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.

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

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).

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

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".

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Thanks, it was in computer science.

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.

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.