When you start your PhD, the three years’ time that is allotted to you seems like a lot of time. You know naïve PHD scholars often feel that it is too much of time to complete a thesis that could be easily completed in even less than half the time approved. Wish if it were that simple. The work is not just this much, before you even start writing, you need to retrieve all the necessary information so that you have a good understanding of the research topic and are able to use it effectively. So researcher should always remember that there is a thumb rule in research that it tales double the length of time you think it would take.
Most of the PhDs are not just about thesis writing, more than that you are expected to undertake research training and some tutoring. Apart from that there are conferences and presentations to prepare. In addition you would be expected to publish couple of articles as a mandatory requirement of your thesis. And in addition there is life beyond PhD which you can’t do without and that applies to all.
There are more factors that play a role in delaying your PhD. The work always starts slow and picks up pace in due course of time. When you have done work for some time and have picked up the flow of research, there would be a phase when you would be enjoying the intellectual freedom that comes with doing up a PhD. It comes as a luxury that is so specific to research that only a PhD scholar can identify with and would eat up into your allotted three years. Before you would even come to know you would be in the final year and nowhere close to finishing your thesis, as you planned in the formative stage. When in the final year, time would seem increasingly relative and time would seem flying at a much faster pace and that is the reason that all PhD scholars have the scope if availing an extension as it just becomes an indispensable requirement for producing a quality thesis which you initially thought was a job that could be done in a jiffy, but here you are taking an extension and trying to do it in a time frame that goes much beyond what you thought!!