One big thing with one distant date becomes a set of small things with near dates. Fill it in here and print it, or print it blank and write on it — it fits one A4 side either way.
Two of the boxes below are the ones people skip and then pay for: the step before the first step, and the thing you need from someone else. Both are here because they are the usual reasons a plan that looked fine in week one falls apart in week five.
Read this first
This is not an assessment. Nothing here is scored, compared or judged, and there is no right number of steps. It is a blank structure for one piece of work.
Your plan as plain text
Copy this into a calendar, a notes app or a message to yourself. Nothing is saved here.
What to ask the department for
Some of the difficulty in an assignment is genuinely in the assignment. Some of it is guesswork the department could remove and often has not been asked to.
The marking criteria in writing, at the same time as the question rather than after submission. If they exist only as a sentence said in a lecture, ask for them on the module page.
An example of a strong answer from a previous year, anonymised. One exemplar removes more uncertainty than an hour of tutorial discussion, and step zero above becomes a ten-minute task instead of a week of quiet dread.
A stated turnaround time on draft feedback. If you do not know whether a supervisor replies in two days or two weeks, you cannot date the box above. Asking is reasonable and the answer is useful to everyone on the module.
The extension process, before you need it. Find out who decides, what evidence is wanted and how long it takes, while nothing is wrong. It is a much harder thing to find out in the week you need it.
A course rep can raise all four at once for a whole cohort, which is a better return than each student solving it privately.
Why the dates matter more than the list
People underestimate how long their own tasks will take, and go on doing it even when they know they have done it before — this is the planning fallacy (Buehler, Griffin & Ross, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67(3), 1994). A list of steps without dates leaves that intact, because every step silently gets assigned to "soon". Dates are what make the estimate visible early enough to be wrong about it cheaply.
Attaching a specific date to a specific step also has support of its own: deciding when and where you will do something has a medium-to-large effect across a large body of studies (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 38, 2006).
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Written for Thought Club as general guidance, not medical advice. Free to read, print, and share.
