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| Paper | Sat on |
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112 days (16 weeks)
Organic Chemistry, on 2026-12-08
Each paper carries two counts, and the second is the one that changes plans. “Days away” is the plain countdown. “Clear days” is what is left once the papers in front of it have been sat, and it is usually far smaller: three papers on the 8th, 11th and 15th are 20, 23 and 27 days away, but the last one has only four clear days of its own. The clear days across a term add up exactly to the span between today and the final paper, so nothing is counted twice.
Day counts are worked out in whole calendar days rather than in hours, so a clock change cannot round one away, and the day of the paper itself is not counted as time to prepare in it. Papers already sat stay on the list and are marked rather than removed, because a timetable with holes in it is harder to read than one with a line through the finished rows.
Type in every paper you are sitting this term with the date each one falls on, say how many study slots a day you expect to fill, and the planner lists them in order with two counts against each. It is built around the observation that watching a single deadline approach tells you almost nothing useful once there are three of them, because the papers behind the first one are quietly sharing its preparation time.
Take three papers falling on the eighth, the eleventh and the fifteenth of December, viewed from the eighteenth of November. The plain counts are twenty, twenty-three and twenty-seven days, and read as a column they suggest the last paper is comfortably the least urgent. It has four clear days.
That second figure is what this page adds. A paper’s clear window opens when the paper before it has been sat and closes when it is sat itself, so the three windows above are twenty days, three days and four days. They sum to twenty-seven, exactly the span from today to the final paper, which is the check that nothing is being counted twice. Preparation for the third paper therefore has to happen before the first one, or it does not happen.
Every count here is a difference between two calendar dates worked out in a single fixed reference frame, never a division of elapsed hours. That is what keeps a spring clock change from turning a day into twenty-three hours and rounding it out of the total, and it is what makes the leap day in February 2028 simply a day like any other rather than a special case somebody has to remember.
Which day it is, though, is read from your own device’s local calendar, because it is already the fourth in Auckland while it is still the third in London and a student in Auckland is not interested in Greenwich. The date the countdown runs from is a field you can edit, so a plan can be drawn from a Monday you have not reached yet.
Multiplying clear days by slots a day gives a session count per paper, and the totals are usually smaller than expected — which is the point of showing them. Papers already sat stay on the list marked as finished rather than vanishing, because a timetable with gaps in it is harder to read than one with rows crossed off, and they contribute nothing to the windows of the papers still ahead.
The slots-a-day figure is yours to supply and nothing here has an opinion about it. How much revision a person can do in a day is not a published constant, and a planner that supplied one would be dressing a guess up as arithmetic. What it can tell you honestly is how few days some of those papers actually have.
Because the clear window is measured from the paper in front of it rather than from today. A paper three weeks out sitting two days behind another one has two days of undisturbed preparation, and that is the number worth planning around rather than the twenty-one.
No. The second one gets a clear window of zero days, which is correct and worth seeing: whatever preparation it needs has to come out of the window belonging to the paper it shares a date with, and no arithmetic can create time that is not there.
Yes. Identical names are numbered apart automatically so that both rows appear with their own counts, which matters more than it sounds — a list that silently merged them would show one row and leave you planning for one fewer paper than you are actually sitting.
It does not. Counting stops at the start of the day the paper is sat, on the grounds that the morning of an exam is not revision time in any sense worth planning with, and including it would make every window on the page one day more generous than it really is.