Many people preparing for one big exam are also eyeing another, whether a second civil services exam, a banking exam or an entrance test. Whether you should is your call. This guide covers the part that arithmetic can help with.
Step 1: size each exam in hours
For each exam, list the subjects and put an hour budget on each. Use your own estimate, ideally from past weeks. This guide does not know how many hours any exam needs, and nobody can tell you without knowing your starting point.
Step 2: find the hours you have
Work out the available time between now and each exam date, using the hours a normal week really gives you. If the two exams are on different dates, count the period before the earlier one and the period after it separately.
Example. An illustration, with made-up numbers. You have 3 hours a day for 100 days before Exam A, which is 300 hours. Exam A needs 220 hours of work by your estimate, and Exam B needs 160 hours before its date. Together that is 380 hours against 300 available, so the plan is 80 hours short before you have started.
If the totals do not fit, you have four moves: lower a budget, add days, shift effort to the exam that comes first, or drop one exam for now. Put your own figures into the capacity calculator.
Step 3: share the time on a rule you can follow
Pick a rule and write it down. Examples: split by exam date, so the nearer exam gets more; split by the shortage each exam shows; or give each exam alternate weeks. Any rule you can keep is better than one you drop. Review it every few weeks, and use your past weeks to check that the split is realistic.
Example from the app. This is an illustration, with test values. An October plan holds UPSC CSE History at 12 hours and Art & Culture at 1 hour, and SSC CGL Quantitative Aptitude at 5 hours, Reasoning at 3 hours and English at 3 hours. That is 24 hours assigned against about 30 hours available, which leaves about 6 hours of buffer, so the month shows as tight. The app rounds each figure on its own, so the sums can look a little off by an hour. For the week, with 5 hours given to UPSC and 5 to SSC CGL, 10 hours are assigned against about 12 available, leaving 2 hours of buffer.
Step 4: keep the two plans apart
Two exams in one list make progress hard to read. Keep each exam as its own goal, with its own subjects, countdown and syllabus, so a good week on one does not hide a slip on the other. In AspirantGoal each subject carries its exam’s name, and Month, Week and Today add the two together, so the buffer you see is the buffer across both.
Step 5: know when to pause one
If one exam keeps showing a shortage, you can set it aside for now. Archive the goal instead of deleting it. Its syllabus, notes, progress and history stay, and you can restore it later and carry on.
How AspirantGoal handles this
- Each exam is its own goal. A goal with several phases, such as Prelims, Mains and Interview, or Tier I and Tier II, keeps a date and a set of subjects for each phase.
- Roadmap shows one card for each goal and a shared shortage message, such as “shortfall at 3h/day shared across 2 roadmaps”.
- Month and Week list the subjects of every goal together, each tagged with its exam, and show available time, assigned time and buffer for the whole period.
- Each exam brings its own stage names, so a task for one exam can offer different stages from a task for the other.
- Archive keeps a paused goal’s syllabus, notes, progress and history, and restoring the goal brings it back. A subject archived by itself stays archived when its goal is restored.
- Permanent deletion is a separate step, and it asks you to confirm it.
See the Features page for the full list.
What this does not tell you
This guide does not say which exams suit each other or whether two exams share syllabus. Check each exam’s official syllabus for overlap. It does not predict how doing both will turn out.