Work backwards from the date rather than forwards from today. Count the days, subtract the last two or three, and divide the material across what is left. Those final days are not spare capacity. They are the consolidation you are budgeting for.
Not how much material exists. How much of it is currently in your head.
This is the number most people avoid, and avoiding it is why revision plans fail on day four. Something as crude as a past paper attempted cold will tell you more in forty minutes than a week of rereading.
If you use flashcards with a scheduler, the count of cards not currently due back is a reasonable proxy. In Reps that number appears on the exam itself, as a bar reading something like 34 of 96 learned.
A hundred and twenty cards with three weeks to go, working to eighteen days rather than twenty-one, is about seven new cards a day plus reviews, and three clear days at the end.
Those three days are doing real work. A card answered correctly once is not learned yet, and material met for the first time the night before has never had to survive a gap. That is the material that disappears under pressure.
New material early, consolidation late. People invert this, because starting new topics feels like progress while reviewing feels like standing still.
By the last three days you should be adding nothing. Everything you meet in that window should be something you have seen before.
Two or three focused blocks beat five hours of drifting. The standard splits are 25 minutes on and 5 off, or 50 and 10 for deeper sessions, with a longer break after every fourth block.
If starting is the hard part, use a short block. Fifteen minutes is a commitment you can make on a bad evening, and the third block is usually easier than the first.
In the final week, every hour should involve producing answers rather than looking at them. Past papers, cards, writing from memory, explaining out loud.
Rereading notes in the last week is the most common way to spend twenty hours and change nothing.
Triage. Identify the highest-weighted material and accept that you will not cover everything. Cramming does work for about forty-eight hours, and if the exam is Thursday that may be the correct tactical choice. It just does not survive to the final in June, so anything you cram is material you will pay for twice.
Fewer than you think, done properly. Three focused hours of retrieval beats eight of rereading.
Only if the alternative is not learning the material at all. Writing a card is itself a review, but a card made the night before has no schedule left to run.
Sleep consolidates memory. A night without it costs you recall on the day and takes the following day with it.