Forty minutes a night and a Saturday morning
A professional exam taken alongside a job is a scheduling problem more than an intellectual one. The material is rarely hard; there is simply a lot of it, and the available time arrives in fragments of ten to forty minutes at the wrong end of the day.
That shape suits a phone badly for learning something new and very well for reviewing something already met. The system that works is therefore split: the reading and the working-out happen at a desk when you can get one, and the phone carries the review, the question bank and the syllabus checklist into every gap in the week.
What to do on the phone, and what not to
| Activity | Phone | Why |
|---|---|---|
| First pass through new material | Poorly | Needs attention and space, not a bus |
| Reviewing what you met last week | Very well | Short, repeatable, works in fragments |
| Practice questions | Well | Ten questions is a complete unit of work |
| Writing out a worked answer | Badly | Typing length answers on glass teaches nothing |
| Listening to a recorded lecture | Very well | Commute, walking, washing up |
| Tracking the syllabus | Well | A checklist is the thing that stops the panic |
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The revision kit
AnkiDroid. The serious spaced repetition tool: free, open, syncs with the desktop version where the cards are quicker to write, and the scheduling is the part that actually works. Unfriendly for a day and worth it for a year.
Brainscape. The same idea with far less setup, rating your confidence after each card. A reasonable choice for anyone who bounced off the previous one.
Quizlet. Fast to build a set and it has decks for most common certifications. Check anything shared against the current syllabus before trusting it.
RemNote. Notes that become flashcards as you write them, which suits people who take notes in outline form and resent making cards as a separate chore.
Flashcards Deluxe. Imports from a spreadsheet, which is the quickest route in if your notes already live in a table of terms and definitions.
Pocket Prep. Question banks built per certification, this one for IT and security exams. Only worth it if your specific exam is covered, and the company publishes separate apps per field.
Obsidian. Notes in plain files on the phone, readable in ten years and by anything. The right place for the syllabus breakdown and the linked notes that hang off it.
Microsoft OneNote. Photographs of textbook pages and handwritten working, all searchable. The best of these for anyone whose notes are partly drawings and diagrams.
Google Keep. Capture in one line while it is fresh: a term you did not know, a question you got wrong. Sorting it out later is much easier than remembering it existed.
Adobe Acrobat Reader. The official syllabus and past papers usually arrive as PDFs, and this opens all of them including the awkward protected ones.
Xodo. The one for annotating those PDFs: highlighting, notes in the margin and a flattened copy you can send to a study group.
@Voice Aloud Reader. Reads your own PDFs and notes out loud. Turning a chapter into a commute is the single biggest addition of study time available to most people.
Udemy. Exam-preparation courses for most professional certifications, with downloadable lessons and frequent discounting that makes the list price meaningless.
Coursera. Stronger on the academic end and on courses from universities, with offline download for the commute.
LinkedIn Learning. Often free through an employer or a public library card, which is worth checking before paying for anything else.
Khan Academy. Free, and the place to go when a professional exam turns out to rest on statistics or algebra you last met at school.
Focus To-Do. A timer and a task list in one, so a session has a defined length and a defined subject. Both parts matter on a tired evening.
Forest. Keeps the phone out of the session by making the phone the thing you would spoil. Gimmicky and effective.
Study Bunny. A study timer with a log of hours done, which for some people is the difference between a plan and a plan that is followed.
Building the plan backwards from the date
- Break the official syllabus into a checklist Every topic, as a line you can tick. Doing this first turns a vague fear into a countable amount of work.
- Count the weeks and divide Two topics a week is a plan. Whatever the number is, knowing it stops the last month being a crisis.
- Do new material at a desk, in blocks One or two evenings a week, or a Saturday morning. This is the part that cannot be done on a phone.
- Make the cards at the end of each block Five to ten cards per topic while it is fresh. This is the handover from desk work to phone work.
- Review every day, before anything else Ten minutes, on the phone, wherever you are. Spaced repetition only works if the daily queue is cleared.
- Add practice questions from halfway Questions expose the gaps that reviewing hides, and they teach the format of the exam, which is a separate skill from knowing the material.
- Sit a full timed paper three weeks out Under real conditions, timed. It will be uncomfortable and it will change your plan for the remaining weeks, which is the point of doing it early enough to matter.
- A question bank matched to your exam
- The official past papers
- One good course if the material is unfamiliar
- A second monitor or a desk, over any app
- Several overlapping course subscriptions
- A premium tier of a flashcard app
- Pre-made decks of uncertain provenance
- A study planner more elaborate than the plan
What a realistic week looks like
Two evenings at a desk of an hour each, ten minutes of review every day including the ones where nothing else happens, one commute a day given to a recorded lesson, and a longer session at the weekend for practice questions. That is roughly six hours, which for most professional exams over three or four months is enough.
The failure mode is not doing too little. It is doing nothing for two weeks and then attempting to recover with a heroic weekend, which produces a large review queue, a discouraging evening and another fortnight off. Ten minutes on a bad day keeps the queue alive and the habit intact, and that is worth more than any app on the list.
Desk for new material, phone for review, a syllabus checklist for the shape of it, and ten minutes on the bad days. The plan matters more than the app.
Frequently asked questions
Are shared flashcard decks safe to use?
As a way of spotting gaps, yes. As your main deck, no: they go out of date, they are often written for another country's version of the syllabus, and the act of writing a card is where most of the learning happens.
How many cards a day is sustainable alongside a job?
Ten to twenty new cards a day keeps the daily review under about fifteen minutes after a few weeks. Adding a hundred in one sitting produces a review queue that becomes a reason to stop.
Is it worth paying for a question bank?
Usually, if one exists for your exact exam. Question format is a skill in itself and practice questions expose gaps that rereading notes does not. Check that it covers the current syllabus version before buying.
Can I revise entirely on a phone?
You can review entirely on a phone. Meeting new material and writing out full answers need a desk. Trying to do all of it on glass is why people feel busy and unprepared at the same time.
What if the exam is in three weeks and nothing is done?
Drop the card-making, go straight to practice questions from a bank, and use the results to decide what to read. It is a worse system that fits the time available.
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