Supervisor not giving helpful academic direction
As a phd student your job is to ultimately create your own track of successful research. An ideal advisor would suggest reasonable lines of research, help you develop your ideas, and give guidance and advice if you ever get stuck. In practice, advisors tend to fall in one of two camps. In the first camp, advisors treat their students as employees who produce results for the advisor's group. In the second camp are 'hands off' advisors who don't do much at all. It sounds to me like your advisor is the hands off type. Take initiative, decide what makes the most sense to work on, and do that. Unless your advisor has explicitly told you, &quot;I expect you to work on X and your graduation depends on finishing X&quot;, they probably just want you to do something publishable and don't care much past that. Take the opportunity to work on whatever you feel is most interesting or most beneficial to you in the long term.