Every review plan drifts. The question is not whether a week will go wrong but whether you notice in week one or in week eight — because a lost week is recoverable and a lost two months is a different problem.
The instrument is a ten-minute weekly review, and the discipline is knowing what to log.
What to log
Three things, and no more:
- Planned versus actual hours, by subject. Not minutes — the shape of the week.
- Completed units. A topic outlined, a paper sat and marked, an audit done. Units are the only honest measure of output.
- Misses. The doctrines that failed retrieval this week, dated.
What not to log: pages read, videos watched, hours "in the chair", mood, or a streak counter. None of them predict anything, and all of them produce guilt rather than information — see how to measure readiness.
The ten-minute weekly review
Sunday evening, or Monday morning. Four questions:
1. What did I plan, and what happened? One line per subject. Not an explanation — a comparison.
2. Which unit did I fail to finish? Name it. Unfinished units are the raw material of drift.
3. What am I now able to produce that I could not produce last week? The most important question in the review year. Three answers, or an admission.
4. What is the plan for the next week, in units? Not hours — units: finish the evidence outline; sit one paper; audit Labor.
Then write the next week's plan into the calendar, in units, with the sessions booked.
The three kinds of drift
Capacity drift. The plan assumes 25 hours; you have 14. This is the commonest, and it is fixed by arithmetic, not resolve: rebuild the plan inside the real number. A plan that is 40% impossible every week produces a permanent sense of failure, which is how review years end early.
Sequence drift. You keep studying the subject you like. The calendar says Labor; the week says Civil. The fix is a visible allocation: the hours per subject, from the weights, on one page — playing the weights.
Silent drift. Nothing feels wrong because nothing is measured. This is why the weekly review exists; without it, drift is invisible until August, when it is expensive.
When the week goes badly
The repair order, from the twelve-month plan:
- Cut new coverage first, from the lightest subjects.
- Protect the retrieval block and the weekly timed paper. They are the compounding items.
- Resume where the plan is, not where it would have been. A plan honestly resumed in week eight beats a plan restarted four times.
Then log what happened, so that the next month's plan accounts for the same thing going wrong again.
Calendars that people actually keep
- One page per month, with the units written in — not an app with a hundred tags.
- Two fixed appointments a week: the retrieval block (daily) and the timed paper (weekly). Everything else is negotiable.
- A visible exam countdown, in weeks rather than days. Days create alarm; weeks create planning.
- A "lost days" buffer of two per month, planned and not counted as failure. Every realistic plan has them; only honest plans write them down.
The one habit
Ten minutes, weekly, on four questions. That is the whole system, and it is enough to catch a drift before it becomes the reason the year did not work.
For the plan itself, see the twelve-month plan; for a block-level structure inside the week, the two-hour study block.