I wish to use MS Project to manage my part-time MSc(Res)/PhD course over the next 5-6 years. I've had some basic experience using MS Project for routine IT project management, but it's not obvious how to handle some of the non-standard aspects of a part-time uni research project. Any general advice, links to relevant templates/tutorials, comments on using MS Project for managing a research project, or advice about the particualr aspects listed below would be greatly appreciated!

I'm the only 'resource' available for all tasks, so I've setup the calendar to reflect the number of 'working' hours available each day (eg. 5 hrs on Monday, 2 hrs Tue-Fri, 5 hrs Sat, 10 hrs Sunday) in a typical week. I want to setup several tasks running simulataneously during a semester (eg , 40 hours for literature reviews, 80 hours for course A, 120 hours for lab work) and allocate a % of available resource (ie. me) to the various tasks (eg. 25% of my weekly hours should be spent on literature review, 50% on lab work etc.) However, some tasks (eg. course A) need to have fixed amounts of resource on particular days of the week (eg. 2 hours for Course A lectures every Friday), while for the rest of the week can use whatever resource is available. Is there an easy way to set this up? -- I suspect it may be easiest to just eliminate these fixed schedule events from the plan (by deducting the hrs allocated to lectures from the total time required for 'course A', and also removing the lecture hrs from calendar to make them unavailable).