Overview
Most people think a PhD must be difficult and worry about whether they will cope. In my experience, the PhD is the easiest qualification I have taken. It requires the most work and the greatest attention to detail, but it is NOT difficult. & Thinking it is difficult means that you waste a lot of time looking for what you must have missed (which you have not) instead of just ploughing on.
Most people agree that it takes one to two years to get the hang of what is wanted. This section may speed up that process for you. As a colleague of mine said, if he had known at the beginning about how the process worked, he could have completed the PhD in a year. This may be a bit of an exaggeration. I think 18 months would do it.
Most people are eager. They have some idea of the main papers or books in their area and so they start there. This seems like a good idea ... until later. Later you realise that the REALLY useful paper cannot be found. It is the one which underlies everything else you are doing. Someone who was completing as I started had to delay submitting for three months because they could not find that all important reference.
So, the first step is to get organised from the start (or earlier!).
Get Organised from before you start!
Find some software that lets you keep track of ALL the literature. There are many of these reference managers. My favourite is Paperpile. Go for the Academic Plan (currently, about £3/month as of Sept. 2026). Then get used to using it by entering those starting references you knew about in the beginning. Add tags. You soon build up a library of tags and that makes finding things MUCH easier. I had my tags arranged in hierarchies. This meant I could cross-reference papers easily.
Next, start your write up before you start your research. Yes, this does sound counter-intuitive, but it will save you a lot of pain. Get your supervisor to provide you with an editable version (Word, Google Docs, etc.) of a PhD from your institution in your area of research. Then, delete the content, but keep the main headings. You now have somewhere to store the work as you go. Apart from you, no-one will read this first version, so do not worry about spelling, grammar or layout (apart from the introductory section and the headings). What you do NOT do is correct this document. Create a copy, adding 1 to the version number, then edit that new version and so on. Keep all these versions. Most you will never need again but some WILL contain that nugget of gold that gets you over the line. One of my supervisors claimed he had 147 versions before he completed. This will seem a waste at first, but will become second nature after a while and it WILL save you a lot of time in the long run.
It is YOUR PhD
One of the surprises is that whatever you thought your PhD would cover is not what you will end up doing. This makes sense when you think about it. If you knew the outcome for your PhD, it would not be new and therefore would not be a PhD. I spent months working on a technique that turned out to be a dead end. I was dreading the next supervisory meeting in which I would have to explain why I had wasted this time. Instead, I was told that if I did not make mistakes then I was not trying hard enough. Interestingly, some of these "mistakes" will end up in your PhD, even if only to say, "I tried this and it did not work because …". It will stop people in your viva asking why you did not consider that.