Use case · Dissertation planning
Make a dissertation feel finishable.
A dissertation is a multi-year project pretending to be a document. Milestones gives you the structure your supervisor assumes you have — chapters as milestones, work sessions as tasks, deadlines that stick.
The hardest thing about a dissertation isn't the writing. It's the scale. Three to five years of work, no boss, vague deadlines, and a single deliverable that doesn't really exist until the very end. Most students plan it in a notes app for the first month, then lose the plan, then panic two weeks before the chapter draft is due.
Milestones replaces the notes app with structure. A dissertation is a project. Each chapter, each major experiment, each revision round is a milestone. Each work session, each reading, each figure to make is a task with a due date. The whole thing fits in one screen and you stop being surprised by what's coming.
How it works
Step-by-step
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Create one project for the dissertation
Resist the urge to split it across projects. "PhD Dissertation", "Master's Thesis", "Doctoral Project" — one project, the whole thing. Every milestone and task lives under it so you can see the full timeline at once.
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Add a milestone per chapter (and the supporting work)
Typical structure: Literature Review, Methods, Study 1, Study 2, Study 3, Discussion, Final Edit, Submission. Each is a milestone with a target date negotiated with your supervisor. Add Defense Prep as the final milestone — it's its own multi-week project disguised as a single afternoon.
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Break each milestone into tasks under 90 minutes
"Write Chapter 2" is not a task. "Draft section 2.1 introduction", "Re-read Smith (2019) and Kahn (2021) for §2.3", "Make Figure 2.4 in R", "Edit §2.2 for clarity" are tasks. The 90-minute rule is the difference between a list you act on and a list you avoid.
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Use tags for cross-cutting work
#reading, #writing, #data, #figures, #supervisor-feedback. Tasks belong to a chapter milestone but tagging lets you ask "what reading is left across the whole dissertation?" or "what's queued for my next supervisor meeting?" — questions a chapter-only view can't answer.
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Set the active milestone for the current month
Mark whichever chapter you're drafting now as Active. Today and Upcoming smart lists then surface only its tasks first. The other chapters are still there, but out of sight. This is the single biggest mental relief you'll get from the structure.
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Add a weekly review
Once a week — Friday afternoon works for most people — open the project, push slipped tasks, capture anything new, recheck the chapter target dates. Five minutes. This is the routine that prevents the two-weeks-before-the-draft panic.
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Plan the defense as its own milestone
Tasks: book the room, prepare slides, do a practice talk, send chapters to committee, prepare for likely questions, print copies. The defense is a launch — treat it like one.
Why it works
A dissertation is too long to hold in your head and too unstructured for a calendar. Milestones is the right granularity: months on the milestone level, hours on the task level, and one project view that shows the whole arc. The structure also matches what your supervisor expects — chapters with deadlines, tasks underneath — which makes update meetings dramatically less painful.
Made for the people doing this work
Persona pages with the full pitch for each kind of user.
Milestones gives students a calm planner for the semester: a project per course, milestones for exams and term papers, tasks for the readings. Works on iPhone in line, iPad in the lecture hall, Mac at the desk.
Milestones is built for academics, PhD candidates, and independent researchers. A project per paper or grant, milestones for submission and revision rounds, tasks for experiments and reviewer comments.
Milestones is the planner for novelists, journalists, and long-form writers. A project per manuscript or beat, milestones for drafts and deadlines, tasks for chapters and revisions. Quiet, focused, native.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
What if my chapter dates change every supervisor meeting?
That's normal — the milestone target dates are meant to flex. Update the date, and Milestones reshuffles your smart lists automatically. The point of the date isn't to commit, it's to make the slip visible.
Should I track citations or references in Milestones?
No — use Zotero, EndNote, or whatever your field uses. Track the *task* ("Add citations to §3.2") in Milestones, but the bibliographic data belongs in a real reference manager.
How does this work with Obsidian / Notion / a paper notebook?
It pairs cleanly. Long-form notes and writing happen in your notes tool of choice; Milestones is the planning layer above it. Use the task description for short context, link to the note in the body if your notes app has stable URLs.
Can I sync this with my advisor / committee?
Not directly — Milestones is single-user. The cleanest workflow is to export a one-page summary (chapters + dates + status) ahead of each meeting; the day-to-day plan is yours.
What about a master's thesis or undergrad capstone?
The same structure works at smaller scale. A 6-month thesis still has 4–6 phases worth treating as milestones — proposal, lit review, data, analysis, draft, revision. The cost of overhead is tiny; the cost of *not* planning at this scale is what costs you the last month of sleep.
Plan your dissertation in Milestones.
Free, native, private. Built for projects that take years, not weeks.
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