Why the colour-coded timetable fails
Because it allocates time by subject rather than by weakness, and because building it feels enormously productive while achieving nothing. A Sunday spent making a beautiful timetable is a Sunday not spent revising, and everyone who has done it knows the specific guilt involved.
Worse, an even split is definitionally wrong: you are not equally weak at everything. Time should follow weakness, and weakness has to be measured rather than guessed — because what you feel weak at is not what you're failing, it's what you dislike.
The method, for all ten subjects
- 1
Get every subject's material into one place
Class notes (photograph the exercise book), the specification, past papers, textbook chapters. Your teacher's emphasis predicts your paper better than any revision guide sold in a shop.
- 2
Take a diagnostic in each subject, early
It will be grim. It is also the only way to know where the hours should go, and it converts 'I'm bad at chemistry' from a feeling into a number.
- 3
Every wrong answer becomes a flashcard
Across all ten subjects, in one deck if you like. FSRS then decides what you see today — which means you have outsourced the allocation decision that the timetable was failing to make.
- 4
Past papers, timed, closed book, from early on
Not saved for the last fortnight. The exam board's own papers are the single most predictive resource in existence and they are free.
The command words are worth real marks
"Describe" is not "explain" is not "evaluate". A six-mark question wants six things. The examiner's report says this every year and almost nobody reads it. Practising in your board's actual idiom — questions generated in your exam's format — trains the format and the content simultaneously.