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Download Excel Timetable

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When I was at school you were usually given 4 or 6 weeks or sometimes longer to study for exams at the end of the term when lectures had covered all the content on the syllabus. What most people did was they then planned out this time to make sure they covered all of the topics on the syllabus that might come up in the exam. Now what most people do when making an exam revision timetable is that they use the traditional method of mapping out a calendar with dates down one column and then they just go through the course syllabus and say I'm going to revise cardiology in this week then respiratory and then anatomy. So they're just working through the syllabus as it's laid out in the course materials. For me when I was using this method I would read though the lecture notes for cardiology and then when I'd read that book chapter I'd tick it off and move onto the next and then do something like respiratory the next week.



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So firstly the main problem I had with this method was that it was pretty passive and just optimised for time spent revising rather than any goal around my actual understanding of a topic. So for example if I had a week scheduled to revise heart disease I'd cram in as much as possible and then move on to respiratory. This gave me the fluency effect and bias of thinking that I knew the topic well as I'd "completed" that planned revision week but in actuality I hadn't done a set number of self-test questions and I hadn't really self-assessed my knowledge during that time as the timetable focused on time spent learning rather than my actual understanding of the topic or any real data on my performance when self-testing. By thinking of your revision as a function of time rather than as a function of your ability to recall and understand topics you are leaving yourself open to the fluency effect where you are inefficiently spending time revising but you feel like you are being productive and then at the exam you still struggle because even though you've spent the time revising you don't actually know the topic well enough.


The second issue I encountered was that when creating a standard revision timetable at the start of an exam revision period I found that I couldn't really predict what topics I would be struggling with in say 4-6 weeks time. It kind of required me to predict the future and I ended up just working my way through a generic list of topics in the order they appeared on the syllabus rather than anything personalised to what I found hardest or any focus on high-yield topics that might be tested regularly. Because the timetable wasn't personalised or focused on high-yield topics not only was it inefficient but it was also quite boring as I'd be spending the same time reading over topics that I knew well or weren't likely to be tested as I would on topics that I knew less and were more likely to be tested. The consequence of this is that I'd often get distracted as the volume of information was pretty huge for medicine and then I'd end up playing Tony Hawk's, Legend of Zelda or hanging out with my friends which then put more pressure and stress on getting a topic completed during that week or time period I'd assigned to it. So just sticking with the timetable was a big challenge.


The third issue with this method is a bit of a follow on from points one and two which is that when you have a standard revision timetable planned out and on an excel spreadsheet or in your calendar there is no real way to quickly see what topics you are weakest at and, unless you are doing past-papers and self-test questions and noting your results down somewhere, there is no way to quickly see from the timetable what your actual learning progress is. So for example yes you can tick off that you did a day of revision on a topic in biology but how are you noting down and tracking your actual ability and understanding of that topic. Did you test yourself and get 50% of the questions correct? Did you do a past-paper at the end of the week and score 75%? Where is that actual information on your ability in that topic being highlighted on the traditional revision timetable. Well this is important because for subjects like medicine where there are loads of things to remember you need to be able to come back quickly towards the end of the exam revision period and go back over topics and if it's not obvious what you're weakest at how will you know what to prioritise and focus on.


This leads me into the fourth problem with the traditional time-based revision timetable which is that by setting very basic deadlines like I'm going to learn these three topics tomorrow or I'm going to cover anatomy by the 14th January you're putting unnecessary pressure on yourself when you don't necessarily know how long it's going to take you to revise a topic. So for example you might start out slowly going through neurology only to find that some topics are a bit more complicated than you thought and you only have 2 days left to get through them on your timetable before you need to move on to gastroenterology. So what ended up happening for me was that I'd push back some topics and then end up either not revising them properly or just leaving them out altogether. This was really poor time management on my part and while it's good to set goals and deadlines these need to be SMART goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely in regards to your learning a topic.


The fifth and final problem I had with using a traditional revision timetable is that the actual process of creating the timetable can itself be an exercise in procrastination. I would spend quite a bit of time planning things out, adding dates to a calendar and some of my friends who were a bit more artistic would use sticky notes, wall charts and colourful highlighters to plan out these really intricate revision timetables which meant they were slow to get started and for me these big, complicated revision timetables almost became overwhelming and made me not want to revise at all as there seemed to be so much to get through.


So these are some of the problems that I encountered with traditional revision timetables, traditional revision timetables aren't inherently bad and are definitely better than having no plan at all. But to quote boxer Mike Tyson "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth" and when I was studying for postgraduate surgical exams around my day job as a surgeon I just didn't have time for creating anything that was complicated and I needed to be efficient and jump into revising around my day job and busy life when I might have an on-call shift or I might need to stay late operating. So I needed something that was much more flexible, efficient and which kept me motivated to revise even if I'd been up all night operating. So let's take a look at the method that I used and then I'll screen share how to do it yourself and then we'll check out some cool tools to help make your revision even more efficient.


The revision timetable and planning system that I used incorporated the best evidence-based learning techniques we've already learned about in this evidence-based learning series namely spacing out your study sessions so that you regularly come back to topics as you begin to forget them which strengthens memory formation. You interleave topics by revising different concepts and topics together to build context and help your brain to better understand the principles behind them and make them more relatable to your existing knowledge. And then finally you revise topics using active recall and testing yourself rather than just passively re-reading or highlighting thing so that you can accurately see how well you know what you are revising.






So what does this look like? Well in contrast to the traditional revision timetable that optimises for time and puts dates down the left column the timetable that I used prioritised topics and my understanding of them and put these down the main left column.


I'll use google sheets, excel, notion or some other tools to do this but I might also colour code these topics or do a quick self-assessment by jumping into a past paper at the start of my revision period and noting down my score and what topics just blew my mind. This give me a good baseline to work from and as we'll see will help to keep me motivated and my revision gamified as I'm competing with myself to better my score as I interleave and go back over topics at spaced intervals.


So in terms of time and actually adding this to a calendar how does this all fit together? Well the most important thing here is to bring in some data based on how quickly you like to spend learning topics. Everyone is different and provided you are using evidence-based study methods like active recall you'll likely do pretty well but you need to assess how long your own revision process takes for a topic. For example if you love using flashcards how big is your deck for that topic and how quickly do you usually go through them? For me I will use pre-made online question banks like Shiken and past-papers combined with my own self-created active-recall questions. Having sat loads of exams in medicine and surgery and science-subjects I know that if I usually test myself using around 2000-3000 questions or about 100-200 questions per topic area and then go over these and read around them to build context I'll usually get top grades. I also know that it takes me 30 minutes to get through around 20 questions depending on how much consolidation and overlearning I'm doing. I'm starting from the end and working backwards which is one of the key principles of effective exam revision and preparation and, well, pretty much anything in life. I know that to do well at the exam I need to learn everything well, I know to do that what work best for me is doing a set number of questions so I can now break this down into manageable goals for each topic and set SMART goals and dates in my timetable to plan to complete these by.

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Download Excel Timetable Keiko Bludworth <bludworthkeiko@gmail.com> - 2024-01-08 00:13 -0800

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