What to do with the topics you are avoiding

Everybody has two or three topics they keep not getting to. The avoidance is rarely about difficulty — it is about the discomfort of being bad at something with yourself as the audience. Left alone, they stay avoided until the morning of the exam.

Take them first in each session, in short bounded blocks: twenty-five minutes on the worst one, then something you can already do. And lower the bar for what counts. For a topic you cannot do at all, being able to attempt the first step of a question is worth several marks against nothing, and it is reachable in an afternoon.