356 days to go: countdown to thesis submission

I am currently registered as a PhD student, funded by a EU project to research novel statistical methods for analysing test results on the presence of pathogens in wildlife. I have been trying to do this for the last two years, and in a little less than one year  my funding runs out (my last quarterly payment is on 31st of December 2013, and 1st of April 2014 marks the end of my third year).

 Hm... That sounds scary.

In order to help produce a neat, 50k word package of novel research by that date, I have decided to start documenting my progress on a weekly basis.  This is both so that I can get a nice carrot of "wohoo! look how much I've got done in the last week", and a stick of risking publically admitting any woefully meager posts the times I fall prey to my all-too-common tendencies of plenty of procrastination. 

So! Here goes. A rule of thumb for a UK thesis seems to be 50 000 words, and somewhere between 60 and 300 pages.  This is a sketch of my thesis structure together with how much, or little, I have completed on each chapter and section thus far:

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How to count bugs in wild animals:

Some statistical methods for wildlife disease surveillance

[Note: This is a non-approved, silly title that most likely is very far from the final one]

Contents

Foreword

Current word count: 91

Current status: Dreamy visualisation of when I can afford to thank everyone for my finished, wonderful thesis.

Summary

Current word count: 200 

Current status: random scribbles

Introduction 

Current word count: 482

Current status: start of a rough structure

Chapter 1: 

A review of statistical methods used  in wildlife disease surveillance

Current word count: 800

Current status: Rough structure draft, and some structured reading done

Chapter 2:

Recovering dynamic trends from multiple test data

Current word count: 5000 words

Current status: Journal article in the final rounds (i.e. five more or so) of review before submission.

Deadline: Submission before summer, i.e before end of May.

Chapter 3. 

Correlation and causation in multi-pathogen arrays

Current word count: 300

Current status: First research phase

Deadlines: Preliminary first report due in two weeks,  Chapter draft by September 1st.

Chapter 4: ?

[Another method chapter, the content of which depending on data and what seems like a logical expansion]. 

Current word count: 0

Current status: Not started

Deadlines: Chapter Draft finished by Dec 1st.

Chapter 5:

Statistical results from the WildTech project

Current word count: 0

Current status: Not started

Deadlines: Chapter draft finished by Jan 1st.

Bibliography

Appendix

Total: 6873/50000 words.

Average words per day needed until 01/04/2014: 118