How to Make an Exam Study Plan (With a Free Study Planner)

Updated 2026-10-20

To make an exam study plan, start from the exam date and work backwards. Estimate how many hours you need, divide them into focus sessions of 25 to 50 minutes, spread those sessions over the days you have, and keep the last day light. The free study planner on this page does that arithmetic for you: type in your exam date, your hours and how many sessions you can handle in a day, and it gives you a day-by-day plan you can print.

The rest of this guide shows how to choose the numbers that go into it, what to do when the exam is closer than you would like, and how to keep the plan alive once the first week gets messy. This site is made by the makers of Flofocus, a Pomodoro study timer app, so you will see a few mentions of it. You do not need the app to make a good plan, and the planner works fine on its own.

Try the free study planner first

Open the study planner and fill in five things:

Exam date. The plan runs from today until the day before the exam.
Study hours needed. Your best guess for the total. The sections below help you pick one.
Focus sessions per day (max). The most sessions you are willing to do on a normal day.
Session length. 15, 25, 30, 45, 50 or 60 minutes.
Two options. Rest on Sundays, and a light day before the exam with a single session.

The tool turns your hours into a number of sessions, then places them one at a time across your study days so the load stays even instead of piling up at the end. If your numbers do not fit, it tells you how many sessions are left over, so you know straight away whether to add days, raise the daily cap or cut the hours. The Print this plan button opens a clean one-page table with a checkbox for each day.

Your entries are not saved on the page, so print the plan or take a screenshot before you close the tab.

Step 1: Write down the exam date and what is on it

Everything else depends on two facts: when the exam is and what it covers. Before you plan any hours, collect the following for each exam.

The date and time, and how long the paper lasts.
The topics or chapters it covers. Your syllabus, course outline or teacher's list is the best source.
The format: multiple choice, essay, problem solving, open book or closed book.
How much it counts toward your grade, because a 50 percent exam deserves more hours than a 10 percent quiz.

University study guides tend to start in the same place. The University of Guelph's exam page, for example, tells students to work out their priorities before building a schedule, and to group the main topics into chunks. The Guelph exam preparation guide is a short read if you want a second opinion.

Step 2: Estimate how many hours you need

This is the step people get stuck on, and there is no formula that is right for everyone. A useful way to estimate is to work from the material instead of from a general feeling.

List every topic or chapter on the exam.
Next to each one, mark it new, shaky or solid.
Give new topics the most time, shaky topics a medium amount and solid topics only a review pass.
Add the numbers up, then add about 20 percent for practice questions and mistakes.

Here is an example for a single course. Say you have twelve chapters. Five are new to you at 3 hours each, four are shaky at 2 hours each and three are solid at 1 hour each. That is 15 + 8 + 3 = 26 hours. Add 20 percent for practice papers and you land near 31 hours. Put 30 into the planner and move on. The goal is a sensible number, not a perfect one, and you can adjust it after the first few days.

If you are unsure, it is better to guess a little high. Finishing early feels good, and extra time is easy to spend on past papers.

How many hours a day should I study?

Pick a daily number you can repeat, not one you can only manage once. Many students find that three to five focused sessions a day is realistic next to classes or a job, though this depends on your schedule and your energy. Guides from universities usually suggest short blocks with breaks rather than very long stretches. A study skills page from SITAC in New Zealand suggests a 10 to 15 minute break every hour to keep your focus up (see their studying for exams page).

A quick way to test a daily target is to ask: if I had to do this every day for a week, would I still be standing? If the answer is no, lower it. A plan you follow at 70 percent beats a perfect plan that you drop on day three.

Step 3: Turn hours into focus sessions

Hours are hard to schedule. Sessions are easy. A session is one block of focused study, such as 25 minutes of work followed by a 5 minute break, which is the standard Pomodoro pattern. If you have not tried it, the Pomodoro technique for studying guide explains the steps.

The sums are simple:

Study hours	25 minute sessions	50 minute sessions
10	24	12
20	48	24
30	72	36
40	96	48

Those figures are the hours multiplied by 60 and divided by the session length, rounded up. The planner does exactly this, so you rarely need to do it by hand.

Which length should you pick? A few rules of thumb:

25 minutes suits reading, flashcards and anything you find tiring or easy to avoid.
45 or 50 minutes suits problem sets, essay planning and past papers, where getting started takes a while and you do not want a buzzer to cut you off.
Mixing both is fine. Use the planner's session length for the main block and adjust by feel.

The Pomodoro timer on this site lets you choose your own focus and break lengths and gives you a longer break after every four sessions, so the same session lengths you use in the planner carry over.

Step 4: Spread the sessions across your days

Now count your days. From today to the day before the exam, subtract any day you know you cannot study: a shift at work, a family event, a trip. Then divide your sessions by the number of days that remain.

For example, suppose you have 72 sessions and 20 usable days. That is 3.6 sessions a day, so you would plan four a day on most days and a few lighter ones. Now suppose you only have 8 days. That is 9 sessions a day, which is about four hours of focused work every day. Possible, but heavy, and a sign that you either need more hours of the day or a smaller target.

Spreading your study over many days is also what the research on learning keeps pointing to. The University of North Carolina Learning Center describes "distributed practice", meaning several short sessions across days and weeks, as one of the most effective study strategies, and suggests doing a little for each class every day. You can read the details on their page about studying smarter.

When you plan, remember these small rules:

Mix subjects across the day if you have more than one exam. Studying the same subject for hours is tiring.
Put the hardest topic early in the day, when you have the most energy.
Plan some days with fewer sessions. Even load is good, but a week with no easy day usually breaks around day five.
Do not schedule the plan to the minute. A session count per day is enough.

Step 5: Add review days and a buffer

A plan that fits exactly leaves no room for real life. Add three things before you call it done.

A buffer. Leave one or two days with no new content, ideally in the middle of the plan and not at the very end. If you fall behind, the buffer absorbs it. If you do not, you get a free day.

Review. Revisit older topics a few days after you first studied them, and again later. Short review sessions of self-testing work better than rereading your notes. Guelph's guide, linked above, advises mixing planning and reviewing across the week instead of saving it all for the end.

A light day before the exam. The planner's last option gives you one gentle session on the day before the exam. That day is for skimming your summary sheet, checking the exam time and place, packing your bag and getting a normal night of sleep. Trying to learn a new chapter the night before tends to cost more than it gains.

What to do if you only have one or two weeks

A shorter runway changes the plan in three ways. You cut the topic list down, you use fewer subjects per day and you start practice questions sooner.

Seven days to go. Divide the exam into about five study days and a light day before. Day one is for mapping the topics and doing a first pass on the most heavily weighted ones. Days two to four are the main study blocks. Day five is for past papers under timed conditions. Day six is the light day. The University of Iowa Tutor Center has a two-page template on exactly this: creating a study plan in seven days or less.

Fourteen days to go. This is a comfortable window. Use the first week for new material and the second week for practice, review and gaps. In the planner, set the hours, set the cap at four or five sessions and tick the light-day option.

Three days or less. Triage. Find the topics worth the most marks and the ones you half know, and spend your sessions there. Skip anything you cannot realistically learn in time. This is not an ideal plan, and the planner will probably warn you that sessions do not fit. That is useful information: it tells you to narrow the list, not to study twenty hours straight.

What if I am already behind?

It happens to nearly everyone. The calm way to fix it:

Put today's date and your exam date into the planner with your real hours.
If it says sessions do not fit, you have three levers: raise the sessions per day, add study days (turn off the Sunday rest, for instance) or cut the hours.
To cut the hours, drop the solid topics first and trim the shaky ones, then protect the heavy-weight material.
Keep the light day before the exam if you can. Sleep is worth more than a last chapter.

Do not start by promising yourself ten hours a day. A plan you cannot keep makes you feel behind twice.

How do I split my time between several subjects?

Give each subject its own hours estimate using the new, shaky, solid method, then add them up. Two ways to schedule them:

Alternate days. Subject A on odd days, subject B on even days. It works when the exams are a few weeks away.
Split days. Two subjects per day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Better when the exams are close together.

If the exams are on different dates, run the planner once per exam, with the earlier exam first, and then lay the two printouts side by side. The earlier exam gets priority, and the later one fills the gaps. The planner does not combine several exams into a single schedule on its own, so this is a manual step.

Make each session count

The plan tells you when to study. What happens inside a session matters just as much.

Decide the task before you start: "do 15 practice questions on chapter 6" beats "study chemistry".
Put your phone out of reach for the length of the session. The how to focus when studying guide has more ideas for the days when your attention is not cooperating.
Test yourself. Close the book and write down what you remember, then check.
Take the break. A short walk or a glass of water refreshes you more than scrolling does.
If your attention is the real problem and 25 minutes feels like too much, see the Pomodoro technique for ADHD guide for shorter blocks and gentler breaks. It is general study advice, not medical advice.

Where Flofocus helps (and where it does not)

The planner on this site gives you the schedule. Flofocus is the app you use to carry it out. It is a Pomodoro timer for Android and iPhone, and these are the parts that fit an exam plan:

Custom focus and break lengths. Set focus from 5 to 45 minutes, a short break and a separate long break in Settings, so the sessions match what you chose in the planner.
Daily goal. Set how many pomodoros you want today. If your plan says four sessions, set the goal to four and watch the progress ring and tomato row fill up.
Tasks with tags. Name what you are studying and tag it Study, or create your own tag per subject, such as "Biology" or "Calculus".
Statistics. See sessions and focus minutes, with a calendar, a chart by tag and your top tasks. The today view is free, and the week, month and year ranges need Premium.
Offline, no account. It works without internet, and there is no sign-up. Your data stays on your phone and you can export it as a file.

Here is what it does not do. Flofocus does not build a study schedule for you, and the browser planner does not sync into the app, so you copy the daily session count into your daily goal by hand. The app does not block other apps or websites, and its stats show time spent, not what you have learned. If you want to compare it with other timer apps before you decide, the best Pomodoro apps for students guide lists what to look for and where the alternatives fit better.

You can also skip the app. Print the planner's table, tick each day off with a pen and use the browser Pomodoro timer for your sessions, as long as you keep the tab open. The Flofocus home page has the download links if you decide you want it on your phone.

A simple example you can copy

Say you have a biology exam in 21 days and you estimated 30 hours of study.

In the study planner, enter the exam date, set study hours to 30, sessions per day to 4 and session length to 25 minutes.
The planner shows 72 sessions. Over about 20 study days that is a little over 3 per day, well under your cap of 4, so there is room to spare.
Tick "Rest on Sundays". The load rises slightly on other days, and you still fit.
Keep the light day before the exam.
Print the plan and stick it on your wall.
Each morning, open your timer, set your goal for the day to match the plan and start the first session.
After each week, check how many sessions you actually did. If you are ahead, use the extra time for past papers. If you are behind, run the planner again from today with the hours you have left.

That last step is the one that makes a plan work. A study plan is a draft, and you update it as you learn how fast you really go.

Questions

How do I start a study plan one or two weeks before the exam?

Write down the date, the topics and the weight of the exam, estimate hours for each topic, and put the total into the study planner. With one to two weeks, the first days go to the heavy or new topics, the middle to practice questions and the final day to light review.

What if I miss a day?

Do not try to double up the next day. Run the planner again from today with the hours you have left. If sessions do not fit, use your buffer day or trim the topics you already know well.

How long should I study before taking a break?

There is no single right answer. Many students use 25 minutes of work and 5 minutes of rest, or 45 to 50 minutes of work and a longer break. SITAC suggests a 10 to 15 minute break every hour. Pick the length at which you can stay focused to the end of the block, and see the Pomodoro technique for studying for more on choosing it.

Is it better to study a little every day or in big blocks?

A little every day usually works better. Learning centers such as the one at UNC describe spreading study over several days as one of the most effective strategies, and short blocks help you avoid procrastinating on big tasks.

Should I plan every hour of the day?

No. Plan the number of sessions per day and the main topic for each, and leave the exact time flexible. Over-detailed timetables collapse the first time something unexpected happens.

Can I make a study plan for more than one exam?

Yes, but do it in two passes. Run the planner for the earlier exam first, then for the later one using the days left over. Put them side by side and adjust so no day is overloaded. The planner covers one exam at a time.