Long term planning: GANTT Charts (please help!)

First: Happy Mother’s Day to all Mums!

Second, this weeks blog post:

This week my BB has asked that I set up a planner/timeline for the 3 year duration of my study. I knew this was coming, and had been putting off doing a chart like this simply because I didn’t know what software to use and quite where to start.  As soon as she asked me I realised that I had put a ‘road block’ in place in my head. I have been so busy reading and researching other aspects of my study, this seemingly practical and obvious first step has been put in my mental ‘too hard’ basket.

So in an effort to move this forward and stop avoiding it I sat down with some sample GANTT style charts from a PhD seminar I attended and opened up Excel. Diligently I began typing in headings for each month, and straight away I found I couldn’t get it to display the dates the way I wanted. I also began to think ahead to when I need to break each month down to doable tasks and short term goals, I think (and WH confirms) that I would have to type it up again each time. This seems like a lot of double handling, and I’m sure my time could be used better.

I know I need help with this and so am asking you, my wonderful readers, for your advice of a program to use.

I would prefer a program that is free/low cost. If it works across platforms or is cloud based, all the better.  And the icing on the cake would be the ability to mesh it with my Google calendar, but I doubt any free software would do that. So what do you use? What would you recommend? What should I stay away from? I would love to hear what you think.

Thanks, in advance, for your advice 🙂

Fiona T