Plan backward from the exam
Most study plans fail at the end: the last week arrives and half the topics haven't been touched. Planning backward avoids that. Start from the exam date, keep the day before it for a full practice test, and count the study days you really have once days off are taken out. Only then share the topics across them.
This schedule maker does it in that order. New topics are spread evenly over roughly the first 70% of your study days, in the order you listed them, and the remaining days before the practice test are for review only. That gap matters: it's the time in which you find out what didn't stick and fix it, rather than learning the last chapter the night before. If you list more topics than that early stretch can hold, they spread into the later days too, and if there are more topics than study days, some days take two or more and the plan says so. There's a longer walk-through of the method in how to plan backward from exam day.
Why each topic comes back three times
A topic you study once and never see again fades fast. A topic you return to after a gap lasts. This is the spacing effect, and it's one of the sturdiest findings in memory research: Cepeda and colleagues' 2006 review pooled more than 300 experiments and found that spreading study sessions out beat cramming the same amount of study into one block, across a wide range of materials and delays.
How long should the gaps be? In a later study, Cepeda's team varied both the gap between two study sessions and the delay before the final test, and found that the best gap grew with the delay: about a day when the test was a week away, and a few weeks when it was months away. For a single exam a few weeks out, that points to short gaps at first and longer ones later. The schedule uses a simple version of that idea - reviews about 1, 3 and 7 days after you first learn a topic, moved to your next study day when one lands on a day off. It's a practical pattern, not a magic formula.
What you do in a review matters as much as when. Re-reading feels productive but tests nothing. Close the notes and answer questions from memory, then check: the effort of recalling is what strengthens the memory.
Mixed review days are a feature
Once the first few topics are learned, most days hold one new topic and reviews of two or three older ones. That mix is deliberate. Rohrer and Taylor's 2007 experiments had students practice math problems either in blocks of one kind or shuffled together. The students who practiced in blocks did better during practice, but the students who practiced a shuffled set did far better on a test a week later. Mixing forces you to work out which method a question needs, which is exactly what an exam asks of you.
So don't regroup the plan into one topic per day to make it feel tidier. If you want more on how and when to mix subjects, read interleaving and mixed practice.
Be honest about your time
Put in the minutes you'll really study on an ordinary day, not on your best one. The schedule splits each day's minutes between its items, giving new material twice the time of a review, and warns you when a topic would get less than ten minutes - at that point you're glancing at notes, not studying. If that happens, the better fix is usually to start earlier or merge small topics, not to promise yourself more hours than you have.
Days off are part of the plan, not a failure of it. Marking the evenings you work or the day you keep for rest means nothing lands there, and a plan you can follow beats an ambitious one you abandon by Wednesday.
When you fall behind
You will miss a day at some point. Don't pile the missed work onto tomorrow on top of what's already there. Instead, set the start date to today and let the schedule redistribute what's left over the days you still have. If it says the days are now crowded, cut the reviews of topics you already know well before you cut anything else, and protect the final practice test: it's the one session that tells you where you actually stand.