You think you have 4 weeks. You don't.
It's May 3rd.
You're looking at your calendar, you see 4 weeks until exams, and you tell yourself: "OK, that's plenty. I'll get serious next week."
Wrong.
And the worst part is, you'll only realize it 3 days before your first exam, when it's too late to catch up.
The math nobody runs
28 days × 24h = 672 hours.
On paper, that's still a lot. Except you're not a machine. Let's subtract:
- 🛌 Sleep (8h/night): −224h
- 🎓 Classes still running until mid-May: −45h
- 🍝 Eating, showers, transport: −84h
- 🚶 Social life, sports, mandatory breaks: −56h
That leaves: ~260h of theoretical study time.
And that's the optimistic scenario
On average, a student actually uses 40 to 50% of that time productively. The rest goes to procrastination, slow starts, "5-minute breaks" that turn into 45 minutes, and entire days where you open the syllabus without retaining a thing.
Reality: ~130 useful hours. Not 672.
What that means in practice
Got 5 courses to pass?
→ 26 hours per course.
Each course averages 200 pages of material?
→ 8 minutes per page.
To read it. Understand it. Remember it. Test yourself on it.
Spoiler: that's really tight.
A concrete example
3rd year, 6 courses for the June session. Not an extreme case, just average:
- Course 1: 320 pages
- Course 2: 280 pages
- Course 3: 180 pages + exercises
- Course 4: 200 pages
- Course 5: 150 pages
- Course 6: 240 pages
Total: ~1,370 pages.
130 useful hours ÷ 1,370 pages = 5.7 minutes per page.
And that's assuming you don't get sick, you don't crack at the end of May, and you never tell yourself "yeah, I'll deal with it tomorrow."
Run the same calculation with your courses. You'll see the wake-up call.
The real problem
It's not that you don't have time. It's that you don't actually know how much you have left.
This is even a documented bias in psychology, going back 30 years: the planning fallacy. We systematically overestimate how much time we have ahead of us, and underestimate what it really takes to learn something. Nobody escapes it. You don't either.
As long as you think in "weeks", you have the illusion of having plenty.
The day you start thinking in "useful hours", you start.
It's that simple.
What you can do today
- Map your exam dates on a calendar. The first date weighs more than you think. It eats into all your final revision weeks.
- Calculate your real hours per course. Count your pages, divide by the time you have. If the ratio scares you, that's because you asked the right question.
- Start with the densest course, not the easiest one. End-of-session fatigue will punish you on whatever you saved for last.
- Set a weekly volume, not a daily one. You'll have rough days, that's just math. What matters is that your week averages 30-35 useful hours.
If you can't be bothered to do all this math by hand, that's exactly what BLO does for you.
You give it your exams, your subjects, your constraints. It gives you a plan based on what you actually have left, recalculated every day according to what you've done (or haven't).
💡 The little iBlocus tip of the week
The "dumb retro-planning" rule.
Take your last exam. Subtract 3 days for final revisions. Subtract 1 day per course for full reviews.
The result = your non-negotiable start date.
If it's already passed, you know what's left to do. Now.
Hang in there for this final stretch.
The iBlocus team 💙
Read also
BLO has changed.
Months of feedback, dozens of frustrations, one decision: rebuild from scratch. Here's the new version of BLO.
The Student Blocus: The Complete Guide to Acing Your Exams
Learn how to organize your blocus (exam revision period) effectively. Planning, study methods (active recall, Pomodoro), mistakes to avoid and free template. The complete guide to acing your exams.
You're exhausted without even having worked
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