Six weeks out: a plan that survives contact with your life

The November sittings are on 3 and 17 November. Six weeks out is the last point where a plan is still a plan rather than triage, so this is the week to make one. Not an aspirational one. A plan that assumes you will lose days to work, family, and being a person, because you will.

The shape that works

Weeks six and five: coverage. Get through the materials once, at reading pace, building your index as you go. The goal is a map, not mastery. Perfection here is the classic trap; candidates who are still "finishing the reading" two weeks out never started practising.

Week four: first full mock. Not when you feel ready. You will not feel ready, and the mock is how you find out what ready even means for you: the pacing, the stamina, and a report that turns six weeks of anxiety into a list of specific categories. Everything after this point is driven by that list, which is a far better planner than your worries are.

Weeks three and two: the loop. Study the top of your report, sit again, review, repeat. This loop is where scores actually move. Two or three cycles beat any amount of additional reading, because the loop practises the thing the day requires: answering, at pace, then fixing what failed.

Week one: taper. Light review, index tidying, logistics, sleep. The last week is covered in its own post; the short version is that nothing you first learn in it will save you, and plenty you do in it can cost you.

Build the slack in

Plan five days a week, not seven. When a week goes sideways, and one will, you drop a slack day instead of the mock. A plan with no slack does not survive its first bad Tuesday, and abandoned plans do more damage than modest ones, because the guilt of the dead plan eats the weeks that remain.

If you want the arithmetic done for you, our free study planner takes your exam date and materials and lays the weeks out. It builds the slack in for the same reason this post tells you to: because it is the difference between a plan and a fantasy.