Study planner

The study planner counts every day from today to the day before your exam and skips your days off. It then spreads the hours evenly over the days that are left, in quarter-hour steps, and never past your daily limit. If the hours do not fit, it says how many are missing and what would make them fit.

Every study day before the final stretch brings in one new part of the material. The final stretch, the last fifth of your study days and at most a week, holds nothing new: it is for practice tests on everything, then fixing what you missed.

From the second day on, a quarter of each day goes to recall, which means writing down what you remember with the notes closed: yesterday’s part, and one from several study days back. So every part is learned once, recalled a day later, recalled again after a longer gap, and tested at the end.

The planner spaces and tests because those are the two study methods with the strongest evidence. A review of 10 common study techniques by Dunlosky and colleagues (2013) gave its top rating, high utility, only to practice testing (quizzing yourself) and distributed practice (spreading study over days). Rereading and highlighting were rated low.

The final days are practice tests because testing beats rereading when the exam comes days or weeks later. In a study by Roediger and Karpicke (2006), students who tested themselves recalled 61% of a passage a week later. Students who reread it recalled 40%.

The gaps between recalls follow the spacing research. Cepeda and colleagues (2008) taught people facts, then tested them after different delays, and found that a good gap shrinks as a share of the time left the further away the test is. For a test a week away it was about 20% to 40% of the time left. For a test a year away it was about 5% to 10%. For an exam a few weeks out, a second look a few days after the first sits inside that range.

The research, the methods ranked, and a worked four-week calendar are in how to study effectively.

The hours you need is the input most people get wrong, and nearly always by guessing low. In a study by Buehler and colleagues (1994), 37 honors students writing a thesis predicted they would finish it in 33.9 days. It took 55.5, and only 29.7% finished by their own estimate.

A better guess comes from a timed sample. Study one chapter or one lecture the way you mean to study the rest, note how long it took, and multiply by the number of parts. Then plan from that number, not from a hopeful one.

A study plan only works if you check it against the hours you really study. The test is simple: in a week, did you do at least 80% of the hours you planned? If the answer is no for 2 weeks running, the plan is too big for your life. Shrink it before it shrinks your exam week.

Here is that check on an example person: a made-up student with finals on September 28, every day written in plain words and counted by the app. Their first week came to 5h. Every week after was more than twice that, ending at 17h.

A good way to count those hours should take them from what you already write or say about your day, with no timers to start. Most journaling apps stop short of that: they keep how the day felt, not where the hours went.

One app built for this is Think in Numbers, a smart journaling app with time tracking built in.

You write or say your day in your own words, as it happens or all at once. The app reads what you wrote and counts the hours that went to each part of it: your study, your phone, and the time you never mentioned (shown as unaccounted). Then it shows those hours over days and weeks. Its targets and weekly plan sit your study hours next to your real ones.

Write my first day

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For iPhone and Android. Try it on your own day before you pay.

The research behind the planner is listed below, each linked to the paper at its publisher.

1. Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J. and Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving Students' Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4 to 58.
2. Cepeda, N. J., Vul, E., Rohrer, D., Wixted, J. T. and Pashler, H. (2008). Spacing Effects in Learning: A Temporal Ridgeline of Optimal Retention. Psychological Science, 19(11), 1095 to 1102.
3. Roediger, H. L. and Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-Enhanced Learning: Taking Memory Tests Improves Long-Term Retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249 to 255.
4. Buehler, R., Griffin, D. and Ross, M. (1994). Exploring the "planning fallacy": Why people underestimate their task completion times. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(3), 366 to 381.