“Learn to draw.” “Get better at presenting.” “Finally do the course.” Every one of those is an intention, and an intention has no date on it. The planner below turns one into a schedule: give it the hours the skill needs and the hours you actually have in a week, and it gives you back a finish date, the weeks in between, and how long each session has to be.
- Week Milestone Hours done Date
- 01 First session 3 5 Aug 2026
- 07 Halfway 21 23 Sep 2026
- 14 Target reached 40 11 Nov 2026
- 18 Target reached, missed weeks counted 40 9 Dec 2026
The arithmetic is deliberately plain: weeks = hours ÷ hours per week, rounded up. The second date applies the miss rate to the same sum, which is the number most plans leave out. Nothing here is sent anywhere or stored.
How it works out the numbers
There is no model and nothing clever. Weeks = hours ÷ hours per week, rounded up. Session length is your weekly hours divided by the number of sessions you split them across. The second, later date applies your miss rate to the same division: at a quarter of weeks missed you are effectively doing three weeks’ work in every four, so the same total takes a third longer.
That last line is the one worth staring at. Most study plans fail not because the estimate of total hours was wrong but because they were written for a perfect week. Putting the miss rate in at the start turns a plan that quietly slips into a plan that told you the truth in advance.
Picking the first number
- A short, specific technique — a spreadsheet function, one drawing method, a presentation structure: 4–10 hours. These are the ones worth finishing this month.
- A named short course — most online courses state their own hours. Use their figure and add a third for the exercises you will redo.
- A working competence — drawing recognisable portraits, being comfortable in front of a room, holding a conversation in a new language: 40–120 hours, and closer to the top of that range than feels reasonable.
- A profession — the planner will happily divide 5,000 hours for you, but a number that big is not a plan. Break it into the competence-sized pieces above and plan one at a time.
Picking the second number
Use the hours you would still find in a bad week, not the hours a good week has in it. The whole schedule hangs off this figure, and it is the one people inflate. Two honest hours beat five aspirational ones, because the plan built on five collapses the first time the week goes wrong and takes the habit with it.
Sessions, not hours
The session figure exists because anything with setup — paint, a camera, a studio, a development environment — loses the first fifteen minutes of every sitting to getting started. Four short sessions a week can lose an hour to setup alone. For those subjects, fewer and longer wins. For memory work such as vocabulary, the opposite is true: more sessions, shorter, spread out.
What it does not know
It does not know the skill, your starting point, whether you have a teacher, or whether the hours you spend are good hours. It is arithmetic on the numbers you give it. What it is good for is making the trade visible: fewer hours a week, or a later date. There is no third option, and a planner that pretends otherwise is lying to you.
Nothing you type here leaves the browser. Nothing is stored and nothing is sent to us.