Study Scheduling

A rough prestudy map of the coming lesson, concepts and relations only, shrinks every later retrieval. Review of already-taught material can be caught up; a missed first pass cannot. Prestudy is the one that stays when those two hours collide — the first thing squeezed when a week gets busy, and the last that should be. The default failure is treating prestudy as optional and cramming review later. This page is when material is returned to, not merely hours blocked to study.

The ranking, on a calendar

Prestudy and spaced retrieval sit as fixed commitments, not leftover time. A calendar entry works when it names when, where, and how — Saturday 9am, kitchen table, mixed retrieval on this week’s three topics, source closed — not “Saturday: revision.” Building a Schedule That Survives owns how that block survives a bad day. This page says what goes in it.

Snowball each topic: cover the whole of it shallowly first, then add a layer of depth on each later pass, rather than finishing one section before starting the next. Prestudy owns what that first pass is. This page schedules it.

The house ladder is four layers — same-day, one day, one week, one month — as a workload convenience, not a memory mechanism. Expanding gaps are not established as stronger. Set the outer gap from the date the knowledge is needed. A four-week exam and a nine-month professional exam do not share one rhythm: the useful gap runs about a fifth to two-fifths of a one-week test delay and falls to about a twentieth to a tenth of a one-year delay. House defaults inside that region: first revision within one to two days, second seven to ten days after the first, third three to four weeks after the second. The ladder will be excessive for some subjects and not enough for others. Spaced Interleaved Retrieval owns the theory and its own longer four-layer schedule; this page owns the calendar template.

The template

Each row has a different job.

Weekly prestudy (Sunday is a default, not a law): concepts and how they relate only. No memorising processes, steps, or definitions. A very basic mindmap. The day moves — Saturday or Monday morning is fine. Two weeks of prestudy at a time is legal; later, a four-to-six-week topic in one go.

End of each weekday: the same-day layer. Revise the day’s material into a fuller understanding. Elaborate the map. Solid on concepts and how processes work. Still no definition-memorising. Start Flashcards for arbitrary detail, not concepts.

End of week: interleaved retrieval covering the last two weeks, not one. Return to weak spots. A gap is anything not recalled, got wrong, or felt unsure about, including things eventually answered. Revision starts with the areas least confident; finding no gaps is a warning. Begin memorising details by teaching and by self-made questions. Block size: half a day, repeating.

Pockets of time: run flashcards. They get no session of their own. Completeness of the sitting does not matter; completeness of the due queue does. Due cards first, extras optional. An incomplete session beats a skipped session. Microlearning System is those daily discrete pockets.

End of month: another interleaved sweep of the month, not the same method as the week. Easy when roughly 80 to 90 percent is still retained at the end-of-week pass — then a half-day. A hard month-pass reads as encoding or the week-pass failed. Block size: a day, a half-day, or a couple of days, repeating. A lot of content adds a mid-month (fortnightly) or mid-week (two-day) review.

Three to four weeks before a test: heavier retrieval — papers, challenge questions, peer quizzing — and a patch of the details that keep failing. Three to four, not two to three: the live spacing page already runs that window, and a reader who opens both must not get two answers.

Preview beats review

Better prestudy shrinks revision time because a prior frame leaves less to forget. No study measures the substitution rate — how many review minutes one prestudy minute buys. The ranking is still this system’s: review can be caught up later; prestudy leaves less to catch up on in the first place. The 80–90 percent figure is a diagnostic this system uses, not a measured retention rate. The week and month rows run the Revision loop: Test, Target, Teach.

When it will not hold

A schedule that will not hold is not always a priority failure. A plan dies from having no schedule, from vague blocks, from over-packing, from energy, from a high-risk slot — and from a template that is simply wrong for the subject, excessive or too thin. Going backward in a skill sequence on the evidence of those gaps is a strength. The destinations on this wiki: Building a Schedule That Survives for a plan that holds on a bad day, Priority 0+1 System for the sort, Task Management for the intake, Procrastination a System Problem when the block keeps dying.

Cramming does not guarantee more forgetting at a one- or two-day horizon: the useful gap shrinks as the test delay shrinks, and massed study is not the losing strategy for a test tomorrow. Distributed practice beats massed practice on delayed retention. “More total work” is unmeasured.

Every retrieval row needs a check against a source, key, or worked example. A session without a key is worth roughly half. Retrieval is not scheduled for material that has no answer key, or the key is built first.

Interleaving is not universally good. Block vocabulary and definition drills. Interleave problem types, cases, and topic comparisons. The daily flashcard layer is exactly the material where interleaving reverses.

A session needs a finish line. Recall each item to a criterion, then stop that item. An open-ended block always feels unfinished.

The template gets a couple of weeks of real use. Scheduling does not have a long learning curve. Weekly reflection is on what is not working. The template is judged after two weeks of held blocks, not after the first missed Saturday.

Wrong for a fixed ladder at both ends of the horizon; wrong for interleaving on word lists; wrong for a due queue treated as optional; wrong for blaming the learner when the template was over-packed. The price is a half-day every week and a half-day to two days every month, repeating. The quit signal is a hard month-pass and a week-pass that was not retaining about 80 to 90 percent — rows stop being added, and encoding or the week pass is repaired. The checkable marks: prestudy still happens on the busiest week; due cards are what the pockets clear first.

A calendar that holds is one that kept that ranking when the week got busy.

Links into the knowledge base

• Prestudy — owns what a prestudy pass is and how to run one. This page schedules it.
• Spaced Interleaved Retrieval — spacing and interleaving theory, the method menu, and its own four-layer schedule. Pre-assessment interval agrees at three to four weeks.
• Time Management, Attention and Scheduling — cluster hub; the parent home, not a technique dependency.
• Revision — Test / Target / Teach; the definition of a gap; finding no gaps is a warning.
• Building a Schedule That Survives — how a block survives a bad day. This page says what goes in the blocks.
• Priority 0+1 System — the prioritisation layer. Destination for mis-prioritisation.
• Task Management — collects the day’s list before the sort.
• Procrastination a System Problem — destination when the block keeps dying.
• Flashcards — arbitrary-detail rule and the pocket layer.
• Microlearning System — daily discrete pockets; flashcards get no session of their own.

Open Questions

How is the outer gap set when there is no exam date?

Should a reader whose encoding is still weak add rows, or repair the weekday pass first?

Sources

• Cepeda, N. J., Vul, E., Rohrer, D., Wixted, J. T., & Pashler, H. (2008). Spacing effects in learning: A temporal ridgeline of optimal retention. Psychological Science, 19(11), 1095–1102. Optimal gap ~20–40% of a 1-week test delay, falling to ~5–10% of a 1-year delay. Open PDF: https://laplab.ucsd.edu/articles/Cepeda%20et%20al%202008_psychsci.pdf
• Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69–119. 94 tests, d = 0.65, from specifying when, where, and how. https://cancercontrol.cancer.gov/sites/default/files/2020-06/goal_intent_attain.pdf
• Karpicke, J. D., & Roediger, H. L. (2007, 2010). Expanding versus equally spaced schedules: no reliable advantage for expanding at long delays. Load-bearing for framing the house ladder as a workload convenience, not a memory mechanism.
• Mayer pretraining principle; Ausubel / Luiten, Ames & Ackerson (1980) advance-organizer literature — directional public backing for the prestudy leg, not a measured substitution rate.