The Assignment Countdown

Turn a due date into steps you can start

Pick a project type, a start date and a due date. The Assignment Countdown turns the days in between into a dated list of steps and holds back a few buffer days before the deadline. Every step opens with something you can do in five minutes.

It's for students who find starting harder than doing. You know you can write the essay. Sitting down to begin is the part that keeps sliding to tomorrow.

Why five minutes? It comes from an old finding about goals. In a 1981 study by Albert Bandura and Dale Schunk, children who struggled with arithmetic worked through a set of self-paced lessons. An experimenter suggested either a small goal for each session (at least six pages) or one big goal (all 42 pages by the seventh session). The children with small goals made quick progress, got better at subtraction and grew more interested in arithmetic. The big goal, in the authors' words, "had no demonstrable effects." That study was about arithmetic, not essays or ADHD. We borrowed its idea anyway: keep the next goal close enough to see.

How the plan is built

Each project type has 6 to 10 steps. Each step gets a share of your working days based on how heavy it is, so a rough draft gets more days than a proofread. Every calendar day counts, weekends included.

About 15% of the days, rounded to whole days, become a buffer right before the due date. You get at least one buffer day once the window is four days or longer. Nothing goes there on purpose, because people guess too early when they predict when their own work will be done. When Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin and Michael Ross asked psychology honors students when they would hand in their theses, the students' best guesses averaged 33.9 days. The real average was 55.5 days, and fewer than a third finished by their own estimate. For more than half of them, even the worst-case guess came too early.

Timing research on ADHD points the same way, with a big caveat. A 2022 meta-analysis of 55 studies found that people with ADHD judged spans of time less accurately than people without it. Those lab tasks lasted milliseconds to seconds, not weeks, so read it as a hint and not as proof.

When there are fewer working days than steps, some days hold two or more steps and the plan tells you so. Windows shorter than four days get no buffer.

The idea isn't new. The University of Minnesota Libraries' Assignment Calculator breaks research and writing projects into steps based on a due date, and Montana State University Library's ADHD Learning Strategies guide links to it. The Assignment Countdown has its own steps, a five-minute start on each one, and buffer days before the deadline.

Questions

What if I'm already behind?

Set the start date to today and build the plan anyway. A short window puts more than one step on some days and may drop the buffer, but every step keeps its five-minute first move. Do the one for step 1 before anything else.

Does the plan skip weekends?

No. It counts every day from your start date to your due date. If you don't work weekends, add the plan to your calendar and drag any weekend steps to the nearest weekday.

Is anything I type saved or sent anywhere?

No. The planner runs in your browser and doesn't send or store your dates. Close the tab and the plan is gone, so download the calendar file or copy the text if you want to keep it.

My teacher gave us different steps. Which should I follow?

Your teacher's. You can still use this plan for rough dates and borrow the habit: before each of their steps, write down one thing you could do about it in five minutes.

Sources

• Bandura, A., & Schunk, D. H. (1981). Cultivating competence, self-efficacy, and intrinsic interest through proximal self-motivation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 41(3), 586–598. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.41.3.586
• Buehler, R., Griffin, D., & Ross, M. (1994). Exploring the "planning fallacy": Why people underestimate their task completion times. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(3), 366–381. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.67.3.366
• Marx, I., Cortese, S., Koelch, M. G., & Hacker, T. (2022). Meta-analysis: Altered perceptual timing abilities in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 61(7), 866–880. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaac.2021.12.004. Plain-language summary at ADHD Evidence.
• University of Minnesota Libraries. (2016, September). Assignment Calculator. https://libnews.umn.edu/2016/09/assignment-calcualtor/
• Montana State University Library. ADHD Learning Strategies (library guide). https://guides.lib.montana.edu/ADHD

Found a mistake in the steps or the research? Email info@inchyapp.com and we'll look into it.