How much of a PhD week is actually writing?
· 7 min read
Most graduate students believe they spend their week writing and then finish the week with very few new words. Both things can be true at once, because writing occupies a small part of a research day and a large part of the guilt. The way out is not more discipline. It is one week of honest measurement, so you argue with numbers instead of with yourself.
Why the estimate is always wrong
Research work has no natural units. A shift has hours, a class has a timetable, a build has a start and an end. A chapter has none of that, so the only record of a research day is memory, and memory reports the parts that felt difficult.
That produces a predictable distortion. The forty minutes you spent fighting a citation gets remembered as the afternoon. The two hours of reading that went smoothly disappears entirely. Email feels like nothing because it arrives in slices of ninety seconds. Add it up over a week and the story you tell your supervisor is not dishonest, it is just reconstructed.
Why your estimate of your own workday is wrong by hours covers the general version of this. The research version is worse, because the work has no external clock to correct against.
Four categories worth separating
Before measuring anything, decide what you want to know. For a thesis the useful split is usually:
- Writing. New prose, revision, structure. Whatever app your words live in.
- Reading. Papers, books, the literature you keep meaning to catch up on. Usually a PDF reader or a browser.
- Doing. Analysis, code, the lab notebook, the statistical environment, the transcription software.
- Everything else. Email, calendars, the department system, the forms, the grant portal.
The fourth category is the one people underestimate by the widest margin, and it is the one you can actually negotiate about.
Measure a week without becoming an accountant
The obvious approach is to log your own hours. Do not. A grad student who logs hours by hand will log them beautifully for three days and then stop, and the three days will be unrepresentative because they were the days you were paying attention.
The alternative is a record that runs on its own. Punchcard notices which app is in front during the day and, at the closing time you set, prints a receipt of the day itemized by app with a time per line and a day total. There is no timer to start, no project to pick and nothing to remember, which is exactly what you want from a tool you are adding to a week that is already full.
It asks for zero macOS permissions: no Accessibility, no Screen Recording, no Full Disk Access. It records app names only, never window titles, document names, URLs or anything on the screen. That matters more in a university than most places. If your work touches interview transcripts, patient data, unpublished results or anything under an ethics approval, “the name of the app that was in front” is a claim you can make to an ethics board without flinching. There is no networking code in the app at all, so nothing leaves the Mac to be claimed about.
Set the closing time to whenever you usually give up, run it for one normal week, and do nothing else. The first seven receipts: a one-week experiment describes the same experiment in general terms.
Reading a research week honestly
At the end of the week, map each app line to one of your four categories and add them up. Some common results and what they usually mean:
Writing is under four hours for the week. This is normal and it is still worth fixing. Writing does not scale with wanting to. It scales with protected blocks, and you now know how few you had.
Reading is enormous. Reading is real work and it is also the most comfortable place to hide from a blank page. The number itself does not tell you which it was. The pattern does: reading that clusters in long blocks is usually genuine, and reading scattered in twenty minute pieces between other things is usually avoidance.
Everything else is bigger than doing. Take this one to your supervisor. Administrative load is the thing a department can sometimes reduce, and “I spent more of last week in the grant portal than in the analysis” is a sentence with a number behind it.
Nothing is where you thought it was. Also common. Wait for a second week before you redesign your life around one set of receipts.
Be careful with the whiteboard problem: thinking, reading physical papers, seminars and conversations in a corridor are all research and none of them appear. A record of app time is a measure of Mac time. Work that happens away from the Mac, and why the record misses it covers how to account for it without pretending.
Turning a week of receipts into a decision
The point of the exercise is one change, not a new system. Pick the single line that surprised you most and make one structural adjustment:
- If writing was small, put one block of writing at the start of a day, before email is open. Not a longer day. An earlier block.
- If admin was large, collect it. One hour on Friday for forms and email instead of a slice every hour. Measure the following week to see whether the total shrank or just moved.
- If the day was longer than you thought, that is a finding on its own. Long weeks are common in research and they are frequently not productive weeks, and the receipt is the only place you will see the difference.
- If the week was chaotic, compare against a quieter one before concluding anything. Teaching weeks and conference weeks are not baseline weeks.
Keep the receipts. A month of them tells you something a week cannot: whether a stretch that felt lost actually was, and what a good week looks like for you specifically, which is the only benchmark that matters when nobody is setting your hours. Counting the days: what a month of receipts teaches you goes into the longer view.
Questions
Can I track time per chapter or per project? No. Punchcard has no projects, tags or clients. It reports time per app. If you need per-chapter accounting, this is not the tool and no amount of configuration will make it one.
Is it appropriate for work under an ethics approval? That is your institution’s call, not ours. What can be said plainly is what is recorded: app names, a timestamp, nothing about content, stored in one file on your Mac, with no network code in the app.
What if I do most of my writing on paper? Then the receipt will understate your writing, and you should note that when you read it. Measure the Mac hours and hold the paper hours in your head.
Does it keep running over a long gap, like fieldwork? Tracking never expires. Days you do not use the Mac simply have little or nothing on them, which is itself an accurate record of those days.