Deadline planner
One terrifying date becomes eight small ones you can actually start. Pick your assignment type, word count and submission date, and get a dated working-back schedule with per-stage word targets, a daily drafting pace, and an honest warning when the time you have left is not enough.
- Free
- No sign-up
- Works offline
- Calendar export
Each type weights the stages differently — a literature review is mostly reading, an essay is mostly drafting.
Used to set per-stage word targets and a daily drafting pace.
Reading today's date…
Your working-back schedule
Loading today's date…
Dates are worked backwards from your deadline and are deliberately conservative: the final slot is always kept empty. If two stages land on the same date, the plan is warning you that the timeline is tighter than the work needs.
Three steps, then stop worrying
- 1
Tell it what you are writing
Essay, report, dissertation chapter or literature review. Each type weights the stages differently — a literature review is mostly searching and screening, an essay is mostly drafting.
- 2
Add the word count and the deadline
The plan scales both ways. More words means longer reading and drafting stages; less time means the plan compresses and tells you honestly that it has.
- 3
Put it in your calendar
Download the .ics file and every milestone lands in Google Calendar, Outlook or Apple Calendar as an all-day event with a reminder — or copy the plan as plain text into your notes app.
Every stage in the plan, and why it earns its place
Students rarely miss deadlines because they are lazy. They miss them because a single enormous task has no obvious first move, so the first move never happens.
Planning forwards — “I will start on Monday and see how far I get” — makes the deadline a distant abstraction and lets the reading stage expand until there is no time left to write. Planning backwards from the submission date does the opposite: every stage gets a hard end, and reading stops because the outline is due, not because you feel finished.
The second thing backwards planning fixes is the planning fallacy — the well-documented tendency to estimate how long work takes when everything goes right. It rarely does. That is why the last slot in every plan here is a deliberately empty buffer, and why the schedule always finishes the day before submission rather than on it.
Third, small dated tasks are startable. “Write dissertation chapter” is not a task you can begin on a Tuesday evening. “Finish coding themes by Thursday” is. The plan below is really a device for converting dread into a next action.
One honest caveat: a plan is a hypothesis, not a contract. If the reading takes longer than the schedule allows, re-run the tool with today’s reality rather than pretending the original dates still hold. A plan you have revised twice is worth far more than one you have abandoned.
What each stage is for
Unpack the brief
The cheapest mark you will ever gain. Most lost marks trace back to answering a slightly different question from the one set, and thirty minutes with the rubric at the start prevents it entirely.
Research and reading
Roughly a quarter of your time. The trap is that reading feels productive indefinitely — set the end date now, and stop when you reach it whether you feel ready or not.
Outline
One line per paragraph: the claim, the evidence, and how it answers the question. An hour here typically saves a day of restructuring later.
First draft
Write fast and badly. Mark gaps as [CITE] rather than breaking flow to hunt for a page number. The point of a first draft is to have something to fix.
Second draft
The stage students skip, and the one that moves a 2:2 to a 2:1. Cut ten percent, strengthen every topic sentence, and check each paragraph is doing work.
Referencing check
Every citation has an entry, every entry is cited, one consistent style throughout. Pure marks, entirely within your control.
Proofread
Leave at least a night between the last edit and the proofread. Reading aloud or using screen-reader playback catches what your eye no longer sees.
Buffer
Deliberately empty. This is the day the library system goes down, the file corrupts, or you get ill. A plan without slack is a plan that fails on contact with reality.
Deadline planner FAQ
How does the planner decide the dates?
Each assignment type has a set of stages with a weighting that adds up to your total available time, and the tool distributes the days between now and your deadline in those proportions. Work is always scheduled to finish the day before submission, so the last slot stays free. Nothing can produce a date in the past — if your deadline has already gone, the tool says so rather than generating nonsense.
What happens if I have almost no time left?
It compresses rather than breaking. Stages start sharing dates, which is the visual warning that the schedule is tighter than the work needs, and the summary tells you roughly how many days a piece that size normally wants. It will never invent a negative date or drop a stage silently.
Will the .ics file work with my calendar?
Yes. It is a standard iCalendar file with one all-day VEVENT per milestone and a reminder the evening before, which Google Calendar, Outlook, Apple Calendar and Thunderbird all import. It is generated in your browser, so nothing is sent to us and no calendar account is connected.
How long should a 3,000-word essay actually take?
Around two to three weeks of part-time work for most undergraduates: roughly three or four days of reading, a day of planning, three or four days of drafting, two or three days of revision, and a day for referencing and proofreading. The tool builds that shape automatically and scales it to whatever time you have actually left yourself.
Want a specialist to take it from here?
Sometimes the plan says you needed to start three weeks ago. If the timeline has already gone, a named subject expert can still turn things round — a piece researched and written from scratch to your brief, an edit of what you have, or an hour of 1-to-1 guidance to get you unstuck. Short deadlines are planned for, not improvised. Support desk open 24/7, 365 days a year.
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