The multiplier is what stops the plan finishing on the wrong day
Divide 300 pages by 30 days and you get ten a day, and a first pass that finishes the night before the exam. That is the plan failing quietly: reading everything once is not the same as being ready to be tested on it, and the schedule has left no room for the difference.
The multiplier adds that room in advance. At 1.35 the daily rate is set as though there were 35 percent more material than there is, so the first pass finishes roughly a week early and the remaining days go to summaries and to the questions you got wrong. At 1.5 you are budgeting for something close to a second full pass, which is the setting that suits material that has to be recalled rather than understood.
The week-by-week table shows first-pass progress, not multiplied progress, which is why the cumulative figures reach the total before the exam date rather than on it.
Rest days are load-bearing
A seven-day plan has no slack in it, and slack is what absorbs the evening that gets taken by something else. One empty day a week does two things: in a bad week it takes the overflow, and in a good week it is a day off. Removing it does not add a day of study, it removes the plan's ability to recover.
The trade is visible in the numbers here. Taking one day a week out of a 30-day run leaves about 26 study days, so the daily rate rises by roughly 15 percent. If that rate is still workable, keep the rest day. If it is not, the problem is the amount of material, not the day off.
Pages, lectures, problem sets
The unit does not matter as long as it is consistent. Pages of a textbook, recorded lectures, past papers, problem sets — all work, and mixing them does not. Recorded lectures are the one to watch, because a 60-minute lecture is rarely 60 minutes of your time: at 1.5x speed with notes and rewinds it usually lands somewhere near 50. Count them at their real cost or the plan understates the load.
With several subjects, run each one separately and add the daily figures together. A single combined run gives the correct total but hides which subject is consuming the time, which is exactly what you need to see when the total is too big.
What the study-day count actually does
Rest days are taken as a fixed pattern across the remaining days rather than being pinned to particular weekdays: with one rest day a week, six days in every seven count. That keeps the arithmetic honest without pretending to know which day of the week you will take off. If your available time varies by weekday — nothing on Fridays, five hours on Saturday — the Study Hours Target Calculator takes the day-by-day figures instead and answers in hours.
Nothing here is a claim about how well the material will be retained. It is a division: material, divided by the days you will actually sit down, with a margin added for going over it again. For the number of days between two dates on its own, without any planning attached, there is the Date Calculator.
Questions people ask
Can I use this for recorded lectures instead of pages?
Yes, and the arithmetic is the same as long as one unit means one thing throughout. The usual mistake with lectures is counting nominal length rather than real time. A 60-minute lecture watched at 1.5x is not 40 minutes of your evening once you include note-taking and going back over the parts you missed; 50 is a more common figure. A plan built on nominal lengths will be about 20 percent optimistic.
What if I am already behind?
Put the material you have left, not the material you started with, into the total, and run it again. The daily rate goes up and the plan stays achievable. What does not work is keeping the old rate and adding the shortfall on top of it, because that produces a number nobody hits, which produces another shortfall. Recalculating from where you actually are is the whole point of a page like this.
Why does the weekly table stop at ten weeks?
Because beyond that the rows repeat and stop being useful. The rate is constant, so week eleven is week ten plus the same increment. If the run is long, the more useful thing to do is recalculate every couple of weeks with your real progress rather than reading a table built on the assumption that nothing changed.
Does the exam day count as a study day?
No. The count runs up to the day before the exam. Whether you get any useful work done on the morning of the exam depends entirely on when it is scheduled, and it is not material you can plan a rate around.