Donaldson R F Academic Deadline Backplanner
Enter the due date and the stages of your work, and see when each stage must start and finish, counting only the days you can work.
A planning aid, not academic advice. Rules on deadlines, extensions and late penalties differ between schools, universities and courses: check yours. Dates are calendar dates only; time zones and the hour of the deadline are not considered. No bank holidays are built in: add your own days off below.
Stages (working days each)
The stage names and lengths are only an example plan: change them to suit your work.
| Stage | Working days | Start | Finish |
|---|
How the plan is worked out
The tool starts at the deadline and counts backwards. The safety buffer takes the last working days before the deadline, then each stage takes its own block of working days, going back from the last stage to the first. Only the weekdays you tick count, and any day you list as a day off is skipped, so a stage can span a weekend or a holiday. The finish of a stage is its last working day and the start of the next stage is the following working day. If you give a starting date (or leave it blank for today), the tool compares the working days you need with the working days you have and says how many you are short, or how much spare time you have. The deadline day itself only counts when you tick the box.
This does not decide how long a stage should take, and it does not know about your other deadlines, term dates or an institution's rules on late work, extensions or penalties. Bank holidays are not built in because they vary by nation and year: type the dates you need. For the number of working days between two dates use the Business Days Calculator; for a weekly study timetable see the Study Schedule Generator; to put the dates in your calendar use the ICS Event Generator.
Source / Last verified: calendar arithmetic only (working-day counting); no external data, holiday lists or institutional rules are used. Checked on 26 September 2026 with worked examples, including a plan that spans a weekend and a plan that skips 25 and 26 December.