Behind on Your Dissertation? How to Rework the Plan

If you are behind on your dissertation, work out a new daily target from today. Take the words you still need and divide them by the writing days left before the deadline. In the example used throughout this article, a 12,000 word dissertation is 2,000 words behind at the halfway point, and the target rises from 500 to 667 words per writing day. That is a third more on each remaining day. Making up the same 2,000 words in one long session would mean writing 2,500 words that day, five times the usual figure.

A third more is a lot, but two modest changes can absorb it. Adding a third writing day for a few weeks and aiming for the lower end of the word limit bring the daily figure back below where it started. An extension will not rescue a schedule that simply slipped. At Alliance Manchester Business School, for example, extensions are meant for unforeseen short-term problems, and time management issues are ruled out as foreseeable events that should be planned for.

How far behind you really are

The size of the gap only shows when you compare your actual total with the plan. You need two figures for that, the words your schedule says should exist by today and the words that are actually in the document. The difference is the shortfall.

The example comes from the article on how many words a day a dissertation needs. It assumes a 12,000 word undergraduate dissertation with 24 writing days, two a week over twelve weeks, which gives 500 words per writing day. Six weeks in, after 12 writing days, there should be 6,000 words. Suppose there are 4,000.

The shortfall is 2,000 words, and at 500 words a day that equals four writing days. When I worked through the example, this conversion was what changed my view of the problem. Two thousand words sound like one long evening, but at two writing days a week they are two full weeks of the schedule.

Count only text you intend to keep. Reading notes and outlines are necessary work, and they still do not belong in the draft’s word count. Including them makes the shortfall look smaller than it is.

Why one long catch-up day rarely works

The obvious plan is a single long day that clears the backlog. In the example it would need the 500 words due that day plus the 2,000 missing ones, 2,500 in total. That is five times the target that has already proved hard to meet.

For comparison, the NaNoWriMo participants of 2018 who actually started a novel averaged 762 words a day across the month, as the article on how many words a day are realistic works out from the organisation’s own figures. Those were people who had signed up to write every day for a month. A 2,500 word catch-up day asks for more than three times their daily average.

A small study by the psychologist Robert Boice points the same way. He followed 16 recently hired academics through their second year on campus. Eight of them wrote in long, hurried sessions lasting anywhere from two to twelve hours, and the other eight usually wrote for an hour a day or less. The long-session group wrote far less in total and had fewer manuscripts accepted. On the Beck Depression Inventory it more often scored in the moderately depressed range or higher, both before writing and especially a day or two after a long session (Boice, Written Communication, 1997).

The study is tiny and compares two extreme groups that Boice picked himself, and he called the observations preliminary.

Helen Sword has examined what the familiar advice to write every day rests on. Writers who back it with research almost always cite Boice, and she argues that this foundation is thin (Sword, International Journal for Academic Development, 2016). She is careful to add that she has nothing against daily writing itself. Boice’s study therefore proves little on its own. It does agree with the arithmetic, which already shows that one day cannot carry a shortfall of four.

The later you notice, the steeper it gets

The point at which you notice the gap decides how much the daily figure has to rise. The table assumes that you manage three quarters of the plan on every writing day, 375 words instead of 500, and shows the target needed for the rest of the dissertation if you correct course after a given number of days.

The shortfall grows by the same 125 words with every writing day. The target rises faster each time, because the same gap has to fit into fewer remaining days. I had expected the cost of a late correction to rise steadily. The table shows a gentle slope for the first half and a steep one at the end, where a gap of 2,500 words more than doubles the daily figure.

A check against the plan every few writing days is therefore worth the two minutes it takes. A writing tracker or a plain list shows early whether your running total sits below the planned line, and the comparison of ways to track writing progress covers the options from paper to apps.

What each change does to the daily figure

In the worked example, 4,000 of 12,000 words exist after 12 writing days, so 8,000 words have to fit into the 12 writing days of the last six weeks. I tried each change on these numbers separately and then the two smallest ones together.

The two small changes work better together than either does alone, because they act on different parts of the sum. The extra days enlarge the divisor, while the lower limit shrinks the number being divided. Combined, they take the figure from 667 down to 453 words.

On a schedule of two writing days a week, a seven-day extension adds only two writing days, which is why it helps less than the combination above it. One option is missing from the table on purpose. You could move days from the editing weeks at the end into the writing phase, but those are the days that pay for the references, the formatting and a final read-through, and they are hard to win back.

Extensions and late penalties

Rules differ between universities, so I read the policies of one in detail, the University of Manchester and its business school, the same institution as the example in the dissertation article.

At Alliance Manchester Business School, students can ask for an extension of written coursework through an online form when unforeseen short-term problems get in the way. According to the AMBS page on coursework extensions, an extension is typically granted for seven calendar days, with a maximum of 14. Requests are due 24 hours before the submission deadline. Later requests are still possible, but then nobody can promise an answer before the work is due.

What I had not expected was how little paperwork the request needs. Supporting documents are not required, although students may send them, and the form asks you to describe your circumstances and how they affected you. The same page states that time management issues do not qualify, because they are foreseeable and should be planned for. The university’s student support page on mitigating circumstances confirms that extensions also cover final year projects and dissertations, and that they are meant for unforeseen or unpreventable personal circumstances. Among the grounds for mitigation it names are a significant illness and the death or illness of a close family member.

The late submission rules in Manchester’s Assessment Framework deduct 10 per cent of the available marks for every 24 hours, counted in calendar days including weekends. Work more than ten days late counts as not submitted and receives a mark of zero, which makes a late submission far more expensive than an extension. I had assumed that a dissertation would get gentler treatment than an essay, and the framework says the opposite. The standard penalty must be used for large pieces of work such as dissertations, defined as single assessments worth 30 credits or more.

In practice, a dissertation marked out of 100 that would have earned 65 receives 55 if it arrives within the first 24 hours after the deadline, even if it is only a minute late. A single extra writing day would have to lift the work by ten marks just to break even, which is a great deal to expect from 500 more words.

If you are ill during the writing phase, ask for an extension before the deadline, because the student support page says the request must be submitted on or before it. A mitigating circumstances claim for coursework can still be filed up to seven calendar days after the affected deadline, and it is expected to come with supporting evidence, such as extracts from your medical notes. Other universities run similar schemes under names such as extenuating circumstances, with their own limits, so the figures above apply to Manchester only.

Agreeing a shorter length with your supervisor

The second large lever is the length. Many word limits come with a margin. The AMBS dissertation style guide, last updated in 2021 and still linked from the current handbook, sets about 12,000 words, plus or minus 10 per cent, so the lower end lies at 10,800. The title page, abstract, footnotes, tables, figures, references and appendices do not count towards that figure. In the example, those 1,200 words are almost two and a half writing days.

The guide names the quality of the analysis and argument as the most important point, “rather than quantity (length)”, and in the same passage warns that a significantly short dissertation tends to have shortcomings such as limited discussion. I looked through the guide for a penalty for falling short of the limit and found none. The AMBS dissertation page says outright that there is no penalty for a shorter or longer length, but it also warns that a dissertation that is too long or too short “could often be a negative factor in your mark”. The safeguard is therefore the conversation with your supervisor. The lower end of the margin is a legitimate target as long as the dissertation still answers its question properly. The easiest cuts usually come from sections that have grown too wide, such as a literature review that summarises work only loosely related to your question.

The guide advises discussing a suitable length with your supervisor, and that conversation is easier during the writing weeks than just before submission. At that point you can still change how much space each chapter gets. If your handbook gives no margin at all, plan a shorter dissertation only with your supervisor’s explicit agreement.

Getting back to it after lost days

After a few lost days it is tempting to let the next one go as well, since the old target is out of reach anyway. Two studies suggest that a single missed day matters less than it feels at that moment, and that it helps not to hold it against yourself.

Phillippa Lally and her colleagues followed 96 volunteers who tried to build a new daily habit around eating, drinking or exercise over twelve weeks, and analysed data from 82 of them. Missing a single opportunity did not materially affect the habit formation process. After a missed day, the participants rated the behaviour as only slightly less automatic, and the rating kept rising once they performed it again (Lally et al., European Journal of Social Psychology, 2010). That finding rests on 140 missed days across 55 participants. The study says nothing directly about dissertations. The article on writing streaks looks at when an unbroken run of days helps and when it turns into pressure.

Closer to student life is a study by Michael Wohl, Timothy Pychyl and Shannon Bennett, published in 2010. They surveyed 119 first-year students from a single introductory psychology class at Carleton University, right before each of the course’s two midterms and once in between. The more students had forgiven themselves for procrastinating before the first midterm, the less they procrastinated before the second, although this held only for those who had procrastinated heavily the first time (Wohl, Pychyl and Bennett, Personality and Individual Differences, 2010). Procrastination and self-forgiveness were self-reported, and the study shows an association. Whether forgiving yourself actually reduces procrastination is something it cannot settle. I had first read the paper as showing better grades as well. Going back to the results, I found only a weak correlation with the second midterm grade in the preliminary analysis, so I leave the grades aside here.

After a lost day, recalculate straight away and start the next writing day with the new target. The lost days then appear only as a smaller number of remaining days, and every session from there on counts against a plan you can still meet.

When reworking the numbers is not enough

1. When you are ill. Ask for an extension before the deadline, or use the mitigating circumstances process with evidence afterwards. Writing harder to cover days of illness uses up time the rules would have given back to you.

2. When data collection stalls. If interviews or lab results are missing, a higher daily target achieves little, because the chapters that depend on them cannot be written yet. Write the parts that stand without data first, such as the methodology and the literature review, and talk to your supervisor early about a fallback.

3. When the new target is double the old one. In the example, the two small changes together reduce the figure by about a third. With a doubled target you would still be more than a third above the original plan afterwards. At that point the length has to be discussed, and the mitigating circumstances route is worth checking if anything outside your control contributed.

4. During revision. Cutting and rewriting lowers the word count when it goes well. For this phase, time at the desk is the better measure, as the comparison of words, hours or pages explains.

What to do now

Write down two numbers, the words already in your dissertation and the writing days left before the deadline. Enter your word limit, the words you have written and your deadline in the dissertation calculator, and set the writing share to 100 per cent if you are only writing from now on. If the result is well above your current pace, add a writing day first, and then talk to your supervisor about the length.

The article on 30 days of measuring shows how a daily figure becomes a habit. For writing projects without a handbook, the general writing goal calculator works out the same figure.

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