I want to second Xaa's point. When I was a PhD student, my advisor told me to enjoy the time because I was free from concerns like funding. We were poorly pa

I want to second Xaa's point. When I was a PhD student, my advisor told me to enjoy the time because I was free from concerns like funding. We were poorly paid, but it was a good time to just be able to concentrate on research. It was common for people in my physics program to take 6 years to finish. But I wouldn't say that most of us "derped" around. During my PhD, I had a portfolio of projects--some that I thought had a high likelihood of success and others that could (and sometimes did) fail miserably. As Xaa mentioned for NIH, there are clocks that start ticking after your PhD. This is true for other funding agencies as well. Also, when it's time to start hiring faculty, the fact that someone took 3 years vs 7 years for their PhD is not as important as their publication record and their plans for future research. We recently brought on a guy with 80+ publications (with a large number of those high impact) during his PhD and one postdoc. I think "rushing" to finish isn't a worthwhile goal (even though I will admit that when I was a student, the stipend was horribly low, so there was a huge opportunity cost for those who decided to do something else later). Being productive during your time is worthwhile. Asking yourself if you are still being productive or if it's time to move on is productive. Not being a technician during your PhD is worthwhile. In that sense, the article has some good advice about taking time out to think. But, in some fields you sometimes just have to grind it out. Say for example, someone is doing an x-ray experiment at a synchotron, or doing MBE synthesis, there are times you just have to put in the hours to get results.