Plan a dissertation timeline by milestones.
Dissertation timelines are dominated by the work that produces no words. Drafting time follows directly from word count and daily output, but if research and reading occupy forty-five percent of the total, the drafting weeks are only fifty-five percent of the schedule — so you divide rather than add. That division is why an eighty-thousand-word thesis that looks like five months of writing is closer to nine months of work.
Drafting time
Writing weeks = target words / words per writing day / writing days per week
Total schedule
Total weeks = writing weeks / (1 - research share)
Five hundred to a thousand words of academic prose is sustainable for most people. Higher figures are achievable in bursts but rarely hold across months, and heavily cited text runs slower.
Revision sits inside the research and reading share, which is why that percentage is often higher than people expect. Substantial redrafting after supervisor feedback should push it toward fifty percent.