Start from a realistic timeline
Most students need three to six months of consistent study. If you are retaking, you likely need less time on content review and more on practice and error analysis. Plan for at least ten hours a week. More helps, but consistency beats volume. Ten focused hours across five days does more than a frantic twenty hour weekend.
Choose resources on purpose
Official materials are non negotiable. Every student should work through the official full lengths, Section Banks, and Question Packs, because they calibrate you to the real reasoning style. Beyond those, pick one primary practice resource and go deep rather than collecting five you touch once. Retakers usually get more from timed passage practice that mirrors test conditions than from another lap through content.
Make your learning active
Reading and watching feel like studying and mostly are not. Active learning means timed passages, detailed review of every miss, and testing yourself from a blank page. The students who improve most are the ones who spend more time analyzing mistakes than consuming new material. If a study block ends with you feeling smooth and comfortable the whole time, it was probably too passive to change anything.
Keep an error log that earns its keep
For every wrong answer, write four things: why the correct answer is right, why yours was wrong, what concept the question tested, and which trap you fell for. That last line is the one most students skip and the one that matters most. The most common error log we see is really just a list of question numbers, which teaches you nothing. Tag the trap family, and after a couple weeks you can predict your own mistakes before you make them.
Take full lengths under real conditions
Timed, quiet room, scheduled breaks, the same start time as your real exam. Your full length scores are the best predictor you have of your actual score, and they are useless if you take them in a comfortable half attention way that will not exist on test day. Aim for at least four to six before your exam, each followed by review that takes longer than the exam did.