PhD students in ML, how many hours on average do you work? [D]

I generally work around 9–10 hours a day, but not contiguously. I can usually carve out a dedicated chunk of time in the morning, take lab or project meetings in the afternoon, and block out around 6–8 PM for commute, exercise, socializing, and dinner. I also get more work done in the evening, since my focus is often best then. On weekends, I mostly run errands and try out new food spots, but I also make sure to do at least a little bit of work every day.

I try to schedule my Slurm jobs so they run when I’m not actively working, so I can collect results when I get back. When I don’t have at least some Slurm jobs going, I feel anxious. I also feel pressure to use coding agents whenever I can. At the same time, I find that these agents can create an illusion of productivity: I end up with more “dead time” where I’m just waiting for the agent to finish thinking.

I’m in my 3rd year as a PhD student at a top-5 program for my field in the US, and I’ve been thinking a lot about time management recently. I'm done with classes and not TA'ing this quarter. I mainly target the 3 main ML conferences (though I would love to make every deadline consistently and don’t), plus core NLP venues and journals.