Estimate how long an assignment will take to complete.
An assignment estimate is three separate jobs, not one. Research is entered directly because it depends on the reading list rather than the word count. Drafting is word count divided by your honest drafting rate, which for most students sits between 250 and 500 words an hour for referenced academic prose — far below free writing speed. Revision is expressed as a share of drafting because that is how it scales: a longer draft needs proportionally more editing. Converting the total into sessions is the step that makes it schedulable.
Drafting
Drafting hours = word count / words drafted per hour
Total and sessions
Total = research + drafting + drafting x revision share; sessions = ceiling(total minutes / session length)
Because academic writing is not transcription. Structuring an argument, checking sources and formatting citations dominate the time, which is why 350 words an hour is realistic while typing speed might be 3,000.
Around 40 percent of drafting for coursework, and more for anything assessed on writing quality. Work that gets no revision pass typically loses marks on structure and referencing rather than content.