Top tips for PhD submission

Have a sanity plan – this is very important. When things get too much you need to know you can take some time out and come back to it better than ever
Have a stash of food – food is not your enemy. Your brain is working flat out and you’re likely doing long hours at the end of the PhD so you need to feed it or else you’ll get ill
Motivate yourself by planning something nice after your submission deadline – in those dark times when you want to give it all up, this will help
Give yourself a fake deadline – I told myself I was going to submit my thesis a month before I actually had to. This way I was stressed and working hard but knew there was some flexibility in my timelines (so when we got engaged and I just wanted to celebrate it wasn’t the end of the world!) Also, this helps if people (supervisors) don’t meet their own deadlines in getting feedback
Start writing early – I started writing my thesis probably at the start of my second year. Yes, some of it then needed changing later down the line but to be honest, that was so much easier than having to write it all at the end!