To keep track of your revisions, you need to learn how to plan your time. I suggest you get a personal diary that allows you to plan your time on a weekly as well as monthly basis. Here’s a suggested plan for you to consider.

Ideally, you should plan your revision schedule as early as one year before the estimated examination date. Revisions for all subjects should also be completed 2 months before your examination starts. With this goal in mind, let’s see how we can plan ahead:

1. Divide up the number of topics you need to cover for every subject by 10 months (12 – 2) to find out how many topics you need to cover in 1 month.

Say, you’re studying 5 subjects and each one has 10 topics. So the total number of topics you need to revise over 10 months is 50. This is equivalent to 5 topics in a month.

2. In your diary, write down 5 topics, one for each subject, you need to revise for every month.

The number of days you devote for each topic depends very much on the time you need to complete 1 topic, how difficult it is, how much time you can allocate etc.

3. Once you’ve done your monthly plan, now look at your weekly plan. You should always plan one-week ahead, and not on the day itself. Make it a habit to plan for the next week on a specific day every time, say Sunday if you consider Monday as the start of a new week.

4. There are 7 days in a week. For each day, write down in your diary all the activities you need to complete for that day. These include time for projects, discussions, revisions, homework, reading, playing and etc. Ideally, most of your time should be spend on study, of course (about 80%). Do this for each of the 7 days.

5. Two months before your exams start, you need another plan. By now, you should know your examination dates. Work backward from the dates to cover all 50 topics within the 2 months. Since you’ve already revised all topics previously, you only need to refresh your memory for each topic. This means the time you need for every topic is reduced drastically. Here are some additional tips for your 2-month plan:

- Mix topics from different subjects for each day. This will make your efforts more effective. E.g. On Tuesday, cover 2 chapters from Science, 1 chapter from Maths, plus 2 chapters from English.

- Each day, before a revision begins, revise the topics you’ve studied yesterday. E.g. On Wednesday, before you revise another chapter for Science, revise the 2 chapters you’ve studied the day before. Likewise for Maths and English.

- Schedule another 2 more revision sessions one week and one day before the examination date for each subject.

Why Plans Fail

Having a plan may not be enough, because many of us planned and yet we don’t follow it. There are 2 main reasons why planning failed.

Firstly, the plan is not practical. If you are too ambitious and create plans that require to make drastic or many lifestyle changes (for example, getting up at 5am when you usually get up at 7am) within a short time, the plan simply won’t work. If you intend to introduce changes in the way you use your time, especially if you have the habit of squandering away time, try to introduce only one change at a time.

Only when the change has been successfully implemented, which will usually take about a month, then should you introduce another change.

More realistically, you should plan your schedule around your life. Or else, you’ll find it very hard to implement the plan you’ve come up with. And by the way, don’t expect to get your plans right the first time. You’ll need to revise and adapt as you go along.

The second reason why plans failed is because as humans, we tend to procrastinate. We know we are supposed to do something according to our plan, but somehow we faced great difficulty doing it. Either because the task is too difficult, it’s not fun enough or simply because we are too lazy. Coincidentally, I’ve just written an article on how to overcome procrastination. It may be useful to you if procrastination is an issue that you face constantly.

Good luck for coming examination!

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To come up with a good study plan, here are some suggestions:

1. Plan backwards. Work backwards from the date of your examination. Calculate how much time you need to devote to each subject so that you can cover all subjects thoroughly. Allow some days as buffer for last minute emergencies.

2. Spread it out. In your study plan, don’t cram the study of one topic or subject over a few days. Spreading the study of one topic over a couple of days gives your mind time to process and absorb information better.

3. Adopt smart learning strategies. Read this post on smart learning techniques thoroughly and adopt the strategies outlined, such as breaking each learning session into 25-minute chunks, schedule revisions in your study plan to increase recall rate, make learning fun and interesting, and always try to relate what you’ve learned to your existing knowledge.

I wish you all the best in your study!