A semester study system: the planning machine from WeSolve+

ectures become practice the same day and returns run themselves.

The daily gear: same day conversion

Each lecture's notes, readings or slide handouts become questions and cards the day they happen, photographed or saved as PDF: ten minutes that spare the semester its classic collapse, week twelve's discovery that week three is gone. The replicated forgetting data motivates the timing, with the steep losses concentrated in the first day; conversion inside that window means the schedule owns the material before decay does. The habit is small enough to keep and load bearing enough to matter.

The weekly gear: floors, one review, one blurt

Weeks run on the floor plus anchor pattern from the weekly template, with two additions: a Friday five minute review of the miss data, and one blurt on the week's hardest topic. The floors keep distribution alive, the lever the effectiveness literature rates at the top alongside practice testing in the 2013 review, and the blurt keeps at least one topic per week honestly audited.

Checkpoints: weeks five and ten

Twice a term, run a half day audit: a mixed round per course across everything so far, misses sorted into the four causes from the autopsy frame, and the next month's anchors set from the results. Checkpoints catch the quiet drifts, a course silently underweighted, a topic family failing together, while they cost an afternoon instead of a finals week. Mid terms, where they exist, double as checkpoints for free.

Exam weeks arrive pre studied

Under this system finals week is the tour from the finals layout rather than an archaeology dig: material is warm because returns never stopped, weak topics are known because misses were logged, and the week's work is compression, not acquisition. In Roediger and Karpicke's 2006 experiment, students who practiced retrieval recalled about 80 percent a week later, against roughly a third for students who only reread.

Closing the term

Term's end: archive the course decks per the organization guide, keep anything the next course will inherit, and write three lines about what the system missed, next term's checkpoint list starts there. Fourteen weeks of ten minute habits is the whole trick.

Group courses into the system

Seminar courses with readings instead of lectures join the same machine: the weekly reading becomes the conversion unit, interrogated per the reading guide, and discussion notes feed the deck. The system cares about material arriving weekly, not about what format the course teaches in. One machine, every course, fourteen weeks. Two habits carry the whole term and neither costs an hour: the day's notes become cards before the day ends, and the week's due queue gets cleared before anything new is added. Everything else in this system is scaffolding around those two.

By Eren Kayıkçı (Study planning and habits)

Last updated: 2026-08-15 · Written with AI assistance and reviewed before publishing.