As I wrote in my first post, I don't want that extra time simply to mean spending longer studying for the bar. The idea is to start earlier, study less intensively, and see whether I can make preparation fit sustainably around a full-time job and the rest of my life, including training for an ultramarathon.

Figuring out the starting point

When I sat the California bar, I had been out of law school for over 10 years, and some of the subjects were completely new to me. This time, I’m not starting completely from scratch - although I have to admit not much of it is fresh.

So before making a detailed study plan, I wanted some idea of my starting point. In August, I took a 50-question mixed MBE diagnostic using UWorld’s free trial and scored 64%. It's only 50 questions, so I'm not reading too much into the number. But it gave me some confidence that I wasn’t starting totally from scratch this time. 

I also took stock of the other constraint that matters: time. At this stage, I can realistically fit around an hour of bar preparation into most days. That's a very different proposition from a conventional intensive bar-prep period, so my plan needs to reflect it.

Starting slowly

My early preparation is deliberately pretty unexciting. I'm working through the substantive material, initially focusing on roughly an hour a day of outline review, and using short spaced-repetition sessions daily to revisit material I've already covered.

Closer to the exam, the balance will shift much more heavily toward practice: MBE questions, essays and performance tests. The aim isn't simply to stretch a conventional bar-prep schedule over six months. It's to use the time I have now for things that may make the intensive preparation period later more manageable. Already I’m finding the daily spaced repetition exercises are helping me to memorize key concepts. 

Being flexible

I'm not particularly interested in hitting an arbitrary number of study hours just because I have six months available. If I can be adequately prepared with fewer hours, that's a great outcome. 

That’s why I’m treating the plan as a plan, not a set of instructions. It's easy to make a beautiful study schedule months before an exam. But I don't want to become so attached to the plan that I keep following it when the information I have later tells me to do something else. So I'm keeping track of things like:

Based on this information, I’ll adjust the plan as I go. If I'm retaining a subject well, perhaps I don't need to keep spending much time on it. If practice exposes a weakness, perhaps something needs to move up in the plan. If work gets unexpectedly busy, perhaps the schedule needs to change rather than leaving me perpetually “behind.”

Over the next few months, I'll share the data, the changes I make to the plan, and what I learn as the exam gets closer.

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