Strategy Document Time management

TIME MANAGEMENT IS THE KEY TO SUCCESS IN CIVIL SERVICES

• By Indu Gupta, Director crackIAS.com

What is time management? In my opinion, time management is the best utilization of time ‘whatever available’ with a person, to accomplish one’s goals. It is NOT about how many hours or days are needed to crack this exam. It is about whatever time you have with you; how best can you use it to crack civil services exam.

Lakhs of people spend many years in the preparation of IAS exam. Yet, they are not able to clear this exam. Was it really a matter of time availability? Many of us who are working to support ourselves or our families; there are housewives who work at home full day & night – who dream to become IAS/ IPS officers; yet they think that the less availability of time will be a hindrance. The Good News is that, this is NOT TRUE!

In my association of over 20 years with civil services exam, I have seen many generations of students including those with unlimited time, yet finally failing to succeed; and those with only limited hours of study yet cracking it with flying colours. The difference between both the cases is all about making RIGHT STRATEGY based on time availability.

Right start your preparation for right time management

  1. Make a list of topics that you need to prepare. As not all topics are equally important, you can leave a good chunk of topics depending on time availability with you. Here I am sharing with you complete list of topics (358 topics in total including both Prelims & Mains) at the end of this document. Download this list to identify which topics you are going to prepare. We have segregated these topics based on the depth to which they have to be prepared (deep, medium, shallow) and their relative importance from current affairs point of view.
  2. If you need some help about which topics are more important from UPSC point of view as compared to the other ones, you need to go thru previous year UPSC papers of at least past 10 years. However, this is a time consuming and cumbersome exercise. There must be sites which provide previous year papers’ analysis; but I doubt if they provide topic-wise analysis as to how many and which questions came from a particular topic in past 10 years or so. At crackIAS, we provide topic-wise UPSC previous year questions for past 40 years to help you identify which topics attracted more questions in UPSC compared to others over the years. However, this is a paid course. In case you wish to buy it, you may follow the link given at the last of this article.
  3. Make a timetable (day-wise) for the selected topics. This timetable must be based on your reading speed and no. of hours you have in a day. For example, if it takes you to read one topic of say 10 pages in 3 hours; and you have 6 hours of study per day; then, prepare timetable by fitting 2 topics per day. But keep good redundancy in the timetable, so that if you miss your deadlines, you may complete them during free days.

Daily time schedule depending on your time availability

 

Time available with you in a Day (average)

No. of total Topics that you must choose for Civils preparation (Out of list of 358 topics given hereunder) *

During Weekdays

During Weekends

3-5 Hours

200-250

· 15 Min (General go thru selected raw news of the day) **

· 45 Min Prepared current affairs. These need not to be of same day; but spend time on regular basis on this.

· 2 Hours or more on preparing the Topic as per your timetable.

Sunday: Revise whatever you read during weekdays. Also attempt at least one test paper for Prelims and write at least 2 answers.

5-8 Hours

250-300

· 30 Min (General go thru selected raw news of the day) **

· 90 Min Prepared current affairs. These need not to be of same day; but spend time on regular basis on this.

· 4 Hours or more on preparing the Topic as per your timetable.

Sunday: Revise whatever you read during weekdays. Also attempt at least one test paper for Prelims and write at least 2 answers.

> 8 Hours

All 358

· 30 Min (General go thru selected raw news of the day) **

· 90 Min Prepared current affairs. These need not to be of same day; but spend time on regular basis on this.

· 5 Hours or more on preparing the Topic as per your timetable.

· 1 Hour on writing practice for mains answers.

· Saturday: Revise whatever you read during weekdays.

· Sunday: attempt at least one test paper for Prelims and write at least 2 answers.

* Topics must be chosen in decreasing order of their importance. Choose most important topics first to prepare. For others, spend less time.

** You may subscribe to Daily News on your mail every day on our website crackIAS.com. That’s completely free.

Time management during exams

Watch this video given below on how to manage your time in the best possible way just before the exam.

I hope this article must be of some use to you. If you really liked it, please spare a minute to give us 5 stars & short comment on link below –

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