How to Get Back Into Studying After a Break: A 14-Day Plan

If you're wondering how to get back into studying after a break, start smaller than feels useful. Spend 15 minutes a day testing yourself on what you used to know, and add time every few days until an hour feels ordinary. Relearning is faster than learning the first time, so more comes back, and sooner, than you expect.

Why old material comes back faster

In the 1880s, Hermann Ebbinghaus measured forgetting by savings: how much less time it takes to relearn something than it took to learn it. In 2015, Jaap Murre and Joeri Dros repeated his experiment (PLOS ONE). Dros spent 70 hours learning lists of nonsense syllables and relearning them after delays from 20 minutes to 31 days:

Most of the loss came within the first day, and the curve flattened after that: a day later, Ebbinghaus still needed a third less time to relearn a list. Dros's month was the one big miss; the authors note those lists were learned early in the experiment and in a short burst. And nonsense syllables are the worst case, with nothing to hang them on.

Real knowledge lasts far longer. Harry Bahrick tested 733 people on the Spanish they had learned in school, up to 50 years earlier. Their retention fell for the first three to six years, then stayed level for up to 30 years. How much survived depended on how well they had learned it: the level they reached and the grades they got. So what you learned well before the break is mostly still there, and what you crammed is what needs relearning.

How to get back into studying after a break: the 14-day plan

Each day has one target you can finish, and the sessions grow from 15 to 60 minutes. Close targets have research behind them. Albert Bandura and Dale Schunk gave children who struggled with arithmetic either a goal for each session, one distant goal, or none (1981). With session goals, the children progressed fast and grew more confident and more interested in the subject; the distant goal had no measurable effect. It was a lab study with children, but the design carries over: a target you can hit today beats a target for the term.

That's 495 minutes in two weeks, about eight hours. From day 8, every session reaches 30 minutes, which is also what counts a day toward a streak in the StudyDuo app. If a day goes wrong, do its target the next day and carry on; don't go back to day 1.

Give the sessions a fixed time as well as a length. StudyDuo's Study Hour happens at the same time every day, converted to your time zone. It's one hour without breaks, and you can join from 10 minutes before it starts. It fits days 12 to 14, when the plan reaches a full hour.

Signs the restart is working

• The day 14 test beats the day 1 quiz on the same topics. Compare the two scores, not your mood.
• You start on time without negotiating with yourself.
• The misses change. Gaps from week one stop showing up, and new mistakes come from new material.

If none of that happens by day 14, repeat days 8 to 14 rather than adding more time.

After a short holiday

A week or two off needs less. Compress the first week into three days: a mixed quiz on the last unit you studied, then two days relearning what it showed, then go straight to day 8. To skip the restart next time, keep one hour a day over the holidays instead.

What to restart with first

Restart with a test, not with your notes. Steven Pan and Shana Carpenter reviewed the research on pretesting: testing people on material before they study it. Such tests can benefit learning, they found, as long as the correct answers get studied afterward, and the effect has shown up with texts, videos and lectures. The size varies from study to study.

For someone coming back, the test does a second job: it shows what survived. That makes the first quiz the most useful 15 minutes in how to get back into studying after a break, because it decides where the other 13 days go. For a language, write every word you remember from the last unit; for math, do the last chapter's review problems cold. Give it 15 minutes on a blank page, then check against your notes and circle the gaps: those are tomorrow's targets. Then work in this order:

1. The foundations the rest depends on. Definitions, formulas and core methods first; details later chapters build on.
2. Old before new. Spend the first week relearning; bring in new material from day 6, a section at a time.
3. Questions before notes, every session. Quiz, check, relearn the misses, quiz again.
4. The same time and place each day. You won't decide whether to study, only what's next on the list.

Getting back into studying with other people

You don't have to restart alone. A friend from your course can take the same 14 days with you and compare day-14 scores. On StudyDuo, you can follow people and get a notification when they start studying, which works as a nudge on the days you'd skip.

If you'd rather not organize anything, a live study with me session gives you people to work beside at any hour. If your break ended a long run of days, what a study streak is good for puts the broken count in proportion. And why studying alone is hard covers the reasons a room of strangers helps.

Coming back after years, not weeks

You won't be the oldest person in the room. In fall 2021, according to the US National Center for Education Statistics, 23% of part-time undergraduates were 25 to 34 and 18% were 35 or older. For full-time students, the figures were 10% and 5%. Together, about two in five part-time undergraduates were 25 or older.

Knowing how to start studying again after a long break of years takes two changes to the plan. The day-1 list is longer, so let the first week cover only the course's first unit. And the gap is often routine more than knowledge. Tie each session to a fixed point in your day, such as straight after work or before the house wakes up. Check what has changed, too: the syllabus, the exam format and the software your course runs on. If you're returning for a degree, run the 14 days before term starts, on the first course's prerequisites. Then the first lecture isn't also your first study session in years.

With those changes, the 14 days are how to get back into studying after a break of five weeks or five years; only the length of the list differs. If weeks pass and you still can't start, or you also feel low or sleep badly, see a doctor or your university's counseling service: no plan fixes that.

If the break cost you a semester's grades, an academic comeback plan works out what each course can still reach.