How to succeed this year

This blog is really aimed at students who want to succeed this year. But it is also for any teachers looking for ideas to help their students prepare for success. If you ask my students they will roll their eyes and tell you about this kind of lesson. It is a lesson well I talk about the year ahead and what they need to succeed. I like to think of it as inspiring, they might consider it annoying. No, do you know what, I think they like it because they ultimately want to succeed.

So here we go, lets look at how to succeed this year.

Perspective to succeed

This lesson starts with me asking students in year 11, 12 or 13 how many days they reckon they have until the exam

So go on – how many days do you think you have until your exam?

My data below is all based on me running this lesson on Monday 5th January – but you can adjust and hopefully you get the point.

A-Level – 154 days – 8th June 2026

GCSE – 151 days – 5th June 2026

Now, lets get the brain working, how many weeks is that?

A-Level – 22 weeks and 1 day

GCSE – 21 weeks and 5 days

Now, how about hours until those dates?

A-Level – 3720 hours until the exam

GCSE – 3648 hours until the exam

Now it depends how you frame this, but in my mind, that is quite a long time, so lets use this information to start to think about a plan.

Making a plan to succeed

Teachers, you have to frame the above carefully as it can be daunting. Students, if you are feeling daunted by the 22 weeks, then please don’t. We now have perspective, and the next step is to make a plan!

So we have 22 weeks basically. So what can we do with that time? Well I guess we can make a plan for how we are going to approach music every day. We have lots of subjects to cover, and life throws lots our way. So lets consider making a small change, but first let me tell you about something James Clear (author of Atomic Habits) once wrote, and is included in that book.

1% change, 365 days a year will lead to 37.78% change over a year.

So, we don’t need to do a lot to make a big change, and if you want to create new habits then check out the book Atomic Habits by James Clear. You can also watch this video where he unpacks a lot of this theory.

Now what does 1% look like, well it is small isn’t it, nothing major, but it will clearly make a difference. Now we have 150 days give or take, and so in that time we can improve by 5% based on the James Clear rule. But let me reframe this around a simple thing you could do every day – 10 minutes a day, every day until the exam.

Minutes to succeed

If you dedicated 10 minutes a day to music, then you would clock up 1500 minutes. Thats 25 hours, or one day and one hour. Now if I told you that in April you were going to spend 25 hours revising for music you would laugh and say – I can’t do that I have other subjects to study. But if you start on January 5th and do just 10 omiuntes a day you will clock up some serious hours of revision!

But in reality 10 minutes isn’t much and we could easily make that 30 minutes. Let’s face it, we need to also throw in practice and that really could be 20 minutes a day easily. So 30 minutes a day is 75 hours or 3 days and 3 hours.

So whilst it seems daunting at first, when you put it like this, maybe in fact you have plenty of time and those minutes to succeed will all add up to success in the end.

How to succeed this year

So you want to succeed this year, well you can. But you can’t do it without perspective, a plan and without putting the time in. Little and often is the key, but also knowing what you need to do in that time. Make sure that you go into any study session with a clear outline of what you want to achieve. All those short sessions will then add up to a lot over time.

Here are a few things you might like to consider when you are studying

1. What do you not know – focus on the topics you know the least
2. Is there something you do not enjoy studying – these topics are often the ones you neglect
3. How did you get on in your last test, essay or assignment – that can feed into your plan
4. What is your goal for the time – write something, memories something, understand something.

These 10 minute revision session are designed to help you cover a lot of ground over time and do just “1%” more every day. Of course you may need to spend more time on a piece of coursework or essay. Homework is maybe separate, but I will leave you to work that out.

Succeed!

My point is simply this – you still have time to make a huge difference, and just a small chunk every day will make a massive difference. You can’t leave your revision until the last minute, so just do a bit every day, 1% of you like.

I hope that as you approach the year ahead this blog will be a helpful reminder of the power of marginal gains and the power of changing just a small thing. And if you are in year 10 or 12 and reading this, then add 365 days to the above and that will give you roughly how long you have!!