The retrospective revision timetable is one of the most powerful changes you can make to your revision scheduling, allowing you to be more intentional with what you study, making you more effective whilst studying less.

So what is a retrospective revision timetable, it is a different way to plan our revision compared to the standard revision timetable. People like to make a  revision timetable, it is often a key thing to do before a period of revising for any exams we may have. But there are two fundamental flaws with the standard revision timetable. One since it is such an important part of our revision we spend lots of time making it look clear, organised and pretty. This can be a way for us to procrastinate and put off actually revising. Secondly, a standard revision timetable is very rigid, it is all preplanned so we can’t adapt what we study. We often have a tendency to study what we know well. It makes us feel great when we can answer all the questions well and do it fast with minimal effort, instead of studying the tough parts of the subject and really working our brain. When we use a standard revision timetable we often plan and put lots of the stuff we like and do well in to increase this feel-good factor. The retrospective revision timetable counters this

A retrospective stops us from procrastinating because it is really simple to sketch out and implement

This is a snapshot of mine for chemistry A-Level earlier this year and it is just a quick and easy table to draw. I have even made it even faster by linking loads of templates across different platforms so you can get one up and running in just seconds for yourself.

But even more importantly it is a fluid revision timetable. It changes as you progress through your revision period so you can visually see what you are good at and what you aren’t, forcing you to work on the topics you are bad at and leave the topics you are good at to rest for while. The timetable force you to exercise spaced repetition making your studying far more effective.

Let’s look at how to implement it.
Firstly decide whether you want to do it digitally or on paper, it makes no difference how well it works so just pick what you think will work best for you and download the template you want below.
Secondly, write out all the topics in a given subject on the left-hand side column. You can see in the example below that I have tables for each large topic, divided into smaller topics. The subject specification often has he subject nicely divided into topics if you want to find what topics to divide your subject into.

Those two steps make up the initial set-up, now it is time to start revising.
What you need to do is every time you complete a piece of revision write the date down for when you completed it and then highlight it according to how you felt about it (in the example I have used the traffic light system which is the most common but if you have some whacky way of your own it will work too).

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If you do this every time you revise you will build a table of how you feel about a topic and when you last did some revision on it. Having this what you can do before you go to bed every night is sit down for 5 minutes, look at your timetable and decide what to study the next day according to how long ago you did certain topics and how difficult you found them. Write them out on a sheet of paper and leave that on your desk so the next morning or whenever you get around to revising you can just get on with it.
Just a couple of things to be aware of is that you need to keep remembering to fill it in otherwise it doesn’t work (obviously). It also requires you to be honest with yourself. For example, don’t give yourself green unless you really did find that particular topic very easy and on the flip side only give yourself red if your revision was a complete disaster and you had to relearn things from step one (maybe there is value in having some in-between colours like and orange for between yellow and red or a blue that goes above green or both, you get the idea)

Here are all the links to the documents you might want to use (they are super easy to draw as well)

click link for files

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That sums up how to use the retrospective revision timetable, give it a go and see how it can change the effectiveness of your revision

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