Planning a Thesis or Dissertation: Word Budgets, Source Matrices, Milestones, Writing Pace & Feedback Rounds

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Split an 18,000-word limit into chapters by share, round each chapter to a clean 50 words, let the last chapter absorb the rounding remainder, convert words into pages and measure how far the draft has come.
• Plan from the end: starting at the submission date, you subtract a buffer and the working days of every later milestone with WORKDAY and a holiday list, find the latest possible start and see how many working days of slack the plan has.
• From ten weeks of word counts you calculate the words added each week, the real words per session, the weeks still needed at the planned pace and a finish date projected from the trend with FORECAST.LINEAR.
• Turn a list of 24 sources into a theme × method matrix with COUNTIFS, measure how recent each theme's sources are, flag thin themes as gaps and highlight the old sources.
• Convert a reading list into hours with a pages-per-hour lookup by type, add up what is still unread, and turn that backlog into the weeks and the date by which it is cleared.
• Work back from the responses a survey needs to the invitations to send, split them by neighbourhood with different response rates, and turn an interview plan into hours and weeks of work.
• Measure how long each draft stayed with the supervisor in working days, how many comments are resolved, how many are still open, and when the last chapter can realistically be signed off.
• Give each chapter a progress credit from its stage, compare it with the plan using IFS status flags, weight the chapters by their size for an honest overall progress, and chart target against drafted words.