Building an A-level revision timetable
Dr Lavan Ganeshkumar, PhD · updated 10 September 2026
The colour-coded timetable that takes a Sunday afternoon to make is one of the most reliable forms of procrastination available to an A-level student. It looks like work, produces nothing, and is usually abandoned within a fortnight.
A timetable is worth having. It is worth about twenty minutes, and it should be ugly.
Sessions of forty minutes, not three hours
Attention on difficult material falls away well before an hour. Two forty-minute sessions with a real break between them are worth more than a two-hour block, and are far more likely to happen.
Put a hard stop on each session. Working until you are exhausted teaches you that revision is exhausting, which is how the habit dies.
Mix subjects within a week, not within a session
Studying one subject exclusively for a week is comfortable and less effective than spreading it. Alternating between subjects across days forces your brain to retrieve which method applies, which is a skill the exam tests directly.
Do not interleave inside a single session, though. Switching topic every ten minutes just costs you the time it takes to settle each time.
Hard subjects go where your day is best
Whichever hour of the day you think most clearly, that hour belongs to the subject you find hardest. Most students do the reverse, saving the difficult one for last, when they are tired and most likely to skip it.
If your best hour is before school, that is where the hard subject goes, even if that feels unreasonable.
Timetable the subject, not the topic
Write "Chemistry, 40 minutes, Tuesday". Do not write "Chemistry: Born-Haber cycles, Tuesday", because by Tuesday the right topic may be something else, and a plan you have to rewrite is a plan you stop using.
What you do inside the session is decided at the start of the session, by what is due for a revisit and what you got wrong last time.
Plan five days, not seven
Leave two evenings unscheduled. They absorb the days that go wrong, and if nothing goes wrong you gain a genuine night off, which is what makes the other five survivable.
A timetable filled to the edges has a failure rate of one hundred per cent, because no week is ever normal.
Write it for a bad week
The right amount of daily revision is the amount you could still do on a day when you feel awful and have a late finish at school. That is usually less than you would like.
A timetable of forty minutes a day that runs for eight months beats three hours a day that runs for eleven days, and it is not close.
Common questions
How do I make an A-level revision timetable?
Plan five days rather than seven, in sessions of about forty minutes with hard stops, give your clearest hour of the day to your hardest subject, alternate subjects across days rather than within a session, and write the subject rather than the topic so the plan does not need rewriting when priorities shift.
How long should a revision session be?
About forty minutes. Attention on difficult material falls away well before an hour, so two forty-minute sessions with a real break between them beat a single two-hour block and are far more likely to actually happen.
Should I revise one subject at a time or mix them?
Mix them across the week but not within a session. Alternating subjects day to day forces you to retrieve which method applies, which the exam tests. Switching topic every ten minutes inside one session just costs you the time it takes to settle.
Why do I keep abandoning my revision timetable?
Usually because it was written for a good week. Fill five days rather than seven, leave two evenings free to absorb the days that go wrong, and set the daily amount at what you could still manage on a day when you feel awful.
Trayna does this automatically. You enter your subjects, your exam dates and how long you have each day, and it builds the route from today to those exams, then adapts it as you go. Maths follows Edexcel; Chemistry, Physics and Biology follow AQA.
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