I’ve been chatting to friends who are working on their PhDs or research lately, and this theme of a kind of intellectual or mental infidelity keeps coming up. I have seen a lot of this on my Twitter feed too, with part-time PhD students I follow talking about having loads of student work to mark, and meetings to attend and other busywork to do that means less time for their PhDs, and a lot of guilt. It’s almost like they feel they are cheating on their PhDs with their jobs; perhaps the converse is true too – that when they work on their PhDs they feel like they are cheating on their other work too.

Balancing work/home/life and PhD is incredibly difficult. There is never enough time for all of it, and for us to give everything an equal share of our time and attention. If you are a part-time student, a full-time parent, and you work as well at a demanding ‘day-job’, as was the case with me, you can often feel like you are going mad. And you can often feel like you are ‘cheating’ on someone or something by focusing on the other things – like taking time away from your family or friends on weekends to get a few precious hours of PhD writing or thinking in, or taking time away from your PhD to attend meetings that could have been emails, or get through the hectic teaching, admin or other work that pays the bills. I felt like this a great deal of the time when I was doing my own PhD – like I was not really focused enough anywhere, and that I was indeed letting one of my ‘sides’ down at one time or another by being distracted, and having my mind elsewhere.

I don’t think these feelings of ‘infidelity’, if you can call it that, are avoidable, sadly. It seems, if my Twitter feed and my circle of friends and colleagues are any kind of representative group, that very few PhD students are able to devote all of their time and attention to just their PhDs. Many have families of their own, or people in their lives, who require care, attention and time; many work as well, as PhD funding that pays for you to be full-time and fully focused on just your PhD is not easy to find in most parts of the world. The PhD, demanding and time-consuming as it necessarily is, often has to be fitted into and around all the other demands on our heads, hearts and time, and (certainly for me) it’s cheating with your PhD rather than on it that feels like the issue.

The PhD can feel like the indulgence – the time away from all these other much more important things, often things that you chose to devote yourself to before you chose the PhD. Reading time? Pure indulgence. You could be taking your kid to soccer, doing the grocery shopping, or planning your teaching for the following week. Writing time? Well, shouldn’t you rather be writing those emails that urgently need to go out, or preparing supper, or sorting out a costume for the Readathon at school tomorrow? Thinking time? Forget about it! Maybe you can squeeze in some thinking time if you get out to walk the dog, go for a run, or drive the kids to tennis lessons and wait for half an hour while they play.

Some of that may not be familiar to PhD students who don’t yet have families, but there are surely other things that seem so much more urgent than your PhD work does? If you are a part-time student with a full-time life, spending time with your PhD away from all the other things that came before it can certainly feel like a kind of ‘cheating’, and often comes with feelings of guilt and indulgence attached. Where we can carve a few hours out of the working day to do some reading, make some notes, or even better write 1000 thesis-worthy words, we no doubt feel like we need to lie about what we were doing. ‘I was working on that proposal for the committee – it’s taking a while to come together’ (followed by frantic proposal drafting to make up). ‘I was in the library when you called’ (even though you were at your desk with the phone turned off because you were writing). I have to confess, I did more than my share of this during my own PhD tenure – it was the only way I could actually get everything done with the hours I had in the day, and the amount of RAM in my brain.

I think the point of this post is really to say that, while you can often feel like you are cheating on everything else you have to do and the people you account to, personally and professionally, with your PhD, your PhD is not indulgent, selfish, or unnecessary. Choosing to do a PhD, for whatever reason, is a huge thing to do, especially when you are also working and parenting and being in a relationship, and so on. The reading, thinking and writing work you need to do to produce your research is valid work; it is part of your professional identity; it is valuable, necessary, useful. If you are a woman – a mother/partner/wife/carer – this is an especially important thing to realise and then give yourself permission to act on, because (and I’m not going to get into this here in more detail) women often do carry more guilt about dividing themselves into too many pieces, and devoting themselves to something that’s only for them when just about everything else they do tends to be for other people.

I needed to be told this often during my PhD: working on your thesis, spending time reading and thinking, these are not indulgences and you are not cheating on your kids, your husband/partner or your job. My PhD was not just about professional advancement and status; it was also about me – doing something that meant something to me outside of my job, my home, my family. So, if you need to close your door, pretend you’re not in, shut off the phone, say NO to the meeting or the extra admin or whatever else you can put off, do it. You are neither cheating on or with your PhD – you are doing your PhD.