What the Study Timetable Planner does
This study timetable maker turns your subjects and the hours you are genuinely free each day into a weekly plan of study sessions with breaks. Subjects you mark as more important or harder get more sessions, subjects are rotated so you are not doing the same one back to back, and the result can be printed, saved as CSV or added to your calendar as an .ics file.
The sharing rule is simple and shown on the page - weight equals priority plus difficulty - so you can see why each subject got its time and change it if it does not suit you. Everything runs in your browser.
How to use it
- List your subjects one per line with a priority and a difficulty from 1 to 3, for example "Chemistry, 3, 3". Leave them out and both count as 2.
- Enter the hours you are actually free for study on each day, after school or work, travel, meals and rest. Be honest; a plan built on imaginary hours fails in the first week.
- Set the session and break length. 25 to 50 minutes with a 5 to 10 minute break suits most people; longer blocks suit essay writing or problem sets.
- Choose Build timetable, check the grid and the time per subject, and adjust the numbers until it looks right.
- Download the calendar file for your phone or computer calendar, print the grid, or save it as CSV.
Reading the results
Sessions per day come from your free time: floor((free minutes + break) / (session + break)). An hour and a half with 45-minute sessions and 10-minute breaks holds one session, not two - the second would overrun.
Time per subject is shared in proportion to priority plus difficulty. A subject with weight 6 gets roughly twice the time of one with weight 3.
A day marked Rest has no session because it had no room, which is often a good thing. At least one lighter day a week makes the rest of the plan more sustainable.
Worked example: a sixth-form student with four subjects
A student lists Maths (priority 3, difficulty 3), Chemistry (3, 3), Biology (2, 2) and English Literature (2, 1), with 2, 2, 1.5, 2, 1, 3 and 2.5 free hours from Monday to Sunday, 45-minute sessions and 10-minute breaks from 17:00.
Two hours holds floor((120 + 10) / 55) = 2 sessions, 1.5 hours holds 1, one hour holds 1, three hours holds 3 and 2.5 hours holds 2 - 13 sessions in the week.
The weights are 6, 6, 4 and 3, which sum to 19. Thirteen sessions shared in that proportion gives 4.1, 4.1, 2.7 and 2.1; rounding by largest remainder gives Maths 4, Chemistry 4, Biology 3 and English 2 - 9 hours 45 minutes of study in all.
Making a timetable you will actually follow
Short, regular sessions spread across the week beat long, rare ones: distributed practice is one of the best-supported findings in learning research. Put the hardest subject in your first session of the day, when attention is freshest, and keep the timetable realistic enough that you can meet it in an ordinary week.
Review the plan after a week. If a subject keeps overrunning, raise its difficulty; if another feels easy, lower its priority, and rebuild.
Limitations: what the result does not prove
- It plans a repeating week, not a countdown to exams. For a plan that works backwards from exam dates, use the Exam Revision Planner.
- Priority and difficulty are your own ratings; the tool cannot know how well you understand a subject.
- The calendar file writes the times in your device's time zone for the weeks you choose; later timetable changes need a new file.
- Rounding to whole sessions means small subjects may get no time when sessions are scarce; the page warns you when that happens.
Privacy: where your data goes
Everything you paste, type or drop is processed in this browser tab. It is not uploaded, logged, stored or sent to analytics. Session recording and tag-manager scripts are switched off on this page.
Standards and sources
- Dunlosky et al. (2013) - Improving students' learning with effective learning techniques
- RFC 5545 - Internet Calendaring and Scheduling (iCalendar)
Frequently asked questions
How many hours a day should I study?
There is no single right number. It depends on your course, exams and other commitments. What matters more is regularity and focus: two well-used hours most days usually beat an occasional six-hour marathon.
How long should a study session be?
Many students work well with 25 to 50 minutes followed by a short break. Choose a length you can stay focused for; if your attention drifts after 30 minutes, 50-minute sessions will mostly be wasted.
Should I study one subject a day or several?
Mixing subjects within a day, which this timetable does by rotating them, tends to help long-term learning compared with blocking one subject for a whole day, and it also keeps sessions from becoming monotonous.
How do I add the timetable to Google Calendar or Outlook?
Download the .ics file and import it: in Google Calendar use Settings, Import and export; in Outlook use File, Open and export, Import. Consider importing into a separate calendar so you can remove it cleanly later.
What if I miss a session?
Do not try to double up the next day. Skip it, carry on with the plan, and if you are regularly missing sessions, reduce the free-time figures and rebuild - the timetable was asking too much.
Last reviewed by the A2Z.Tools team against the sources listed above.
