Map my dissertation onto a real calendar
Enter your start date and your target defence. You get dated phases — proposal, ethics, collection, analysis, writing, revisions, defence prep — that you can print and put in front of your supervisor at the next meeting.
Free: the Progress Monitoring Dashboard
A timeline tells you the plan; this tells you whether you are on it. A simple tracker for milestones, writing output and supervision actions. We’ll email you the PDF.
Why dissertations slip, and where the time actually goes
Dissertations rarely run late because of the writing. They run late because of the things nobody scheduled: an ethics application that took eleven weeks instead of four, recruitment that stalled over a summer, an analysis that revealed the data could not answer the question as posed. None of these are unusual, and all of them are budgetable.
Working backwards from a fixed defence date changes the conversation. Instead of “I’ll try to finish the analysis soon”, you have a date by which analysis must be done for everything downstream to fit — and if that date is already impossible, you have found out now rather than in month twenty.
- Ethics is not a formality. Approval commonly takes one to three months, and a single round of revisions can double it. Nothing downstream can start until it clears.
- Pad collection and analysis. These two overrun more often than the rest combined, and they are the phases where problems surface late.
- Committee turnaround is time you do not control. Treat feedback windows as fixed blocks, not as slack you can compress.
- Re-plan monthly. A timeline is a decision-making tool, not a promise. Its value is telling you early that something has to change.
Phase allocations use typical proportions and are a starting point to argue with, not a programme requirement. Confirm hard deadlines — submission windows, defence dates, funding end dates — with your graduate school, because those are the constraints that actually bind.
Frequently asked questions
How long should each phase take?
It varies by discipline and by whether you collect primary data, but the research-and-writing stretch after an approved proposal commonly runs twelve to twenty-four months. The proportions matter more than the total: allocating realistically across phases is what prevents the crisis, and a plan that gives eighteen months to writing and three weeks to ethics will fail regardless of its length.
My timeline gives four months for data collection and that is impossible.
Then you have learned something valuable early, which is the point. Your options are to move the defence date, narrow the study so it needs less data, change the design to something faster such as secondary data or a cross-sectional rather than longitudinal approach, or start recruitment sooner by front-loading the ethics application. Take the printed timeline to your supervisor and have that conversation with a document rather than a feeling.
Should I actually show this to my supervisor?
Yes — it is the most useful thing you can bring to a supervision meeting. A dated plan converts a vague progress discussion into a specific one, gives your supervisor something concrete to push back on, and creates a shared record of what was agreed. It also makes it much easier to raise a problem, because you can point at the phase rather than apologise for a delay.
Can I save or print the plan?
Yes. The Print / Save as PDF option shows just the schedule, with the page furniture stripped out, so you get a clean one-page document to file or circulate.
What if my dates change?
Re-run it. That takes seconds, and re-planning after a slip is far more useful than holding on to a schedule you already know is wrong. Many candidates re-run it monthly and keep the printouts as a record of how the plan evolved, which is genuinely handy when writing a progress report.
Is anything I enter stored or uploaded?
No. The plan is built entirely in your browser. Your dates are not transmitted or saved.