How long does it take to do a PhD?

I can't remember where I was going, in May or June 2016, but I do remember I was at an airport waiting to board a flight. I had had initial conversations with potential PhD supervisors and was still unsure whether this was really, truly, the right path for me, at that point. So of course I Googled: How long does a PhD REALLY take? How much time would I have to spend on it, while working more than 50% in my job, volunteering for a professional organisation, and with two children in primary school?

Of course the answer was the same as to the question "how long is a piece of string", to which one of my supervisors introduced me after I asked how long I should spend on building my dataset (answer below!). But I found something useful after all. Someone had tracked their time for their whole PhD journey, and while I don't remember their conclusion about how long it took, this finding reassured me that I can take on this project. I also felt encouraged to track my time too, and I adopted their distinction of PhD time into "core", "admin" and "extra" activities. Now that I have submitted my thesis, I think it's time to share my time spent, tracked with the free version of timesheet.io.

"PhD Core" includes anything that progressed my project more or less directly. "PhD Admin" includes activities such as getting a smart card, recording supervision meetings, completing forms and similar interactions with the university. And "PhD Extra" is side projects, teaching, conferences, and one research strand ("qualitative ICS") that started as a side project but was then integrated into the core PhD. Finally, as part of researcher training, my university offered a PG Certificate in Research Training with added assignments. Here's the overview of how long it took:

PhD Core: 2368 hours

PhD Admin: 175 hours

PhD Extra: 779 hours

PGCert Research Training: 118 hours

And here's an example of how long a part-time PhD in Applied Linguistics might take, without the necessary extras such as teaching and conferences:

Breakdown of how long I spent on the various components of my PhD*

Writing was obviously the single most time-consuming activity, approaching 1,000 hours (including getting up and finding snacks, and, occasionally, writing WhatsApp messages instead of my chapter - anything to help me do SOMETHING).

Creating and analysing the corpus of REF2014 impact case studies, in its various combinations (see chapter 4), also took a long time, approaching 400 hours - this is "the research" itself (findings in chapters 5 to 7).

I probably spent lots more than 218 hours reading; these are the hours that were dedicated to just reading (and note taking and all the rest, probably also searching for literature), and that resulted in the two literature reviews (chapter 2 on research impact assessment, chapter 3 on linguistic methods and theories).

Then I was lucky enough to have three supervisors at any one time, who were all happy to meet and discuss a variety of issues, apparently for 180 hours between them (this figure also includes preparation and follow-up on my part, though).

If anyone reads my thesis in the future and asks "huh, interviews?" - these were preliminary, at a preliminary stage, and didn't have much influence on my work later on, so I saved some space in the methods chapter. The many hours were the rigour of the interview schedule, ethics approval, getting interviewees, follow-up etc. - for the three interviews that I actually ended up doing.

Paper is this: Reichard, B., Reed, M.S. et al. Writing impact case studies: a comparative study of high-scoring and low-scoring case studies from REF2014. Palgrave Commun 6, 31 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-0394-7. If you were involved in preparing impact case studies for REF2021, you may have come across it.

And here is where it tips into PhD Extra:

Breakdown of how long I spent on various PhD-related, but not thesis-related, components*

You can see that some categories reappear here, either because I did some reading/writing/analysis for something that I knew was on the side, or because something was later redefined into the core project (e.g. Qualitative ICS) or given its own counter elsewhere (Researcher Training). I want to highlight the following categories as "necessary extras":

Conference - I didn't go to many of those - one Linguistics conference (CLAVIER in Bari, Italy, in 2017) and two practitioner-facing conferences (UK-KMb in Newcastle, 2018; ARMA in Belfast, 2019). But presentations and planning takes time, and conference days can be looooooong. I am now looking forward to hopefully attending Impact Ignite in Southampton (November 2025).

Career is something I didn't expect to have to engage with - I had a job as teacher of English for Academic Purposes and felt quite settled there. After a couple of PhD years, I started applying my research finding and expertise to activities related to my research - in other words, I started my research impact consultancy business, which means that I had to think about how much time to dedicate to this, position myself and get this new job off the ground (eventually this moved to its own category, outside of PhD). I also had several sessions with the careers people at my university, some of which were extremely helpful, even for me as a mature student with an existing career. Takeaway point: Every student who has some working life ahead of them (maybe not the post-retirement super-mature student) could get something out of the careers service. Don't be shy, there are experts there who can help you.

And finally, teaching is something that most PhD students spend a lot more time on. I only did one semester of one module, to "get it under my belt" according to one of my supervisors - I didn't feel I had to prioritise this, given that my main job was teaching language at a university.

So there you have it. This is how long it took me, between May 2016 (initial conversations with potential supervisors) and May 2025 (first submission of my thesis for examination). Is any of this transferable, or helpful in informing anyone's decision? I don't know. Maybe it is interesting to see what kinds of things can be included; what kind of time goes into the core project and how much extra there is (is any of the extra "optional"? By whose standards? With what goal in mind?) and how much time, or what proportion of time, the writing takes. For context, I did this PhD explicitly not in order to pursue an academic career; if I had, some of the balances would have been different (e.g. more teaching, more conferences). And I had years of experience teaching academic writing, which sometimes helped speed up my writing process because I had spent so many classroom hours manipulating language on a whiteboard that it had become second nature.

If this helps anyone, let me know! And if you have any questions, please also get in touch.

* This does not add up to the figure above, because I was not always consistent with tagging tasks into categories and this breakdown only counts time that was allocated to a specific tag.