If you are now a PhD Student, don’t miss Matt Might’s list of 10 easy ways to fail a PhD. I couldn’t agree more with all of them!
My contribution to the list is the following: Remember that your supervisor for sure wants you to be successful (if you publish more, he publishes more) but this doesn’t mean that your objectives are exactly the same. Yours is finishing the PhD ASAP, his is to get as much publications as possible so he may try to push you to publish more than strictly necessary to finish the PhD (who knows where you’ll end up after?). Of course, this does not apply if you’re one of his PhD students, in that case, he will also be interested in you finishing ASAP so that he can claim that he has successfully supervised PhD students.
While PhD student completion and publications are obviously nice, they aren’t the main reasons I supervise PhD students: it’s to train and educate highly qualified people who will enhance our community. Broadly, I supervise PhD students so that the community gets good colleagues (and I will get good colleagues!) who will push the field forward.
… and have some fun in the process. But not everybody is as nice as we are Richard!