Begin with where you're going. Build the plan that gets you there.
Complex projects rarely fail because people do not care about the work. More often, the challenge is turning a significant goal into a sequence of meaningful, manageable decisions—while protecting the quality of the work along the way.
Plan Backward is a suite of intelligent planning tools designed to help students, scholars, writers, and creative professionals move complex projects from intention to completion.
Each application begins with the same simple idea: start with the deadline, identify what the work requires, and build backward.
But Plan Backward is more than backward scheduling.
The applications are designed to understand something about the kind of work being done. Instead of asking users to construct their own project-management systems, Plan Backward uses a small number of meaningful questions to identify the stages, dependencies, review periods, and professional practices that belong in the plan.
You describe the project. Plan Backward helps map the work.
Plan Backward Academic
Plan Backward Academic helps scholars move long-term academic projects toward completion without reducing scholarship to a generic task list.
The application considers the nature of the project, research approach, methodology, institutional requirements, and deadline to build a schedule that reflects how scholarly work actually develops.
If a project involves interviews, for example, the plan can account for human-subjects preparation and IRB processes before data collection begins. Other project choices activate the research, analysis, writing, review, and completion stages appropriate to the work.
Plan Backward Research Writing
Research Writing focuses on the particular challenge of moving from research and ideas to a completed piece of scholarly writing.
The application builds backward from the target completion or submission date, accounting for the stages required by the writing project: research, development, drafting, revision, formatting, review, and submission.
The goal is not simply to finish writing.
It is to protect enough time for the thinking, reconsideration, revision, and refinement that strong research writing requires.
Coming Soon: Plan Backward for Film & Screenwriting
Intelligent planning for creative work
The Plan Backward ecosystem is expanding to support filmmakers and screenwriters.
Plan Backward Filmmaker builds production schedules backward from production, delivery, screening, and festival deadlines—accounting for the work of pre-production, production, post-production, and delivery.
Plan Backward Screenwriter uses its Workflow Intelligence Engine to build schedules responsive to the project itself, adding the research, development, drafting, revision, and submission work the screenplay requires.
Neither application needs the creative content to understand the workflow the project requires.
You describe the project. Plan Backward helps map the work.
Plan Backward Filmmaker and Screenwriter are coming soon.
The planning experience is guided by one question:
What is the next meaningful step that strengthens this project and moves it toward becoming a rigorous scholarly contribution?