June 2008 is here and I have not started reading!

It’s that time of the year when many of us notice that we have not yet started reading. A chill goes though our veins when we notice that all the targets we set at the beginning of the study for the June 2008 session have not been achieved. Such targets include putting in 2 hours a day, putting off time each weekend to go through the week's study material and many more. The panic shall certainly set in and before you know it, you are spending more time worrying than studying. You may even start carrying study notes of all the papers you are doing with the hope of completing all of them in one day. Well, your situation may not be as adverse as the ones I faced, but I am certain that there are always ounces of panic cropping up every time you think about June 2008.

I believe that the first thing we have to appreciate is that come June 2008, we shall be required to face the examiner and present what we have learnt during the period. My hope is that we convince the examiner that we deserve a pass.
Having gone through similar situations, I have a few recommendations that may be helpful to you;

• First, we have to take our minds off the past and stop blaming ourselves for all the time we have wasted
• We should appreciate that all we have now is the time that is left and it is self-defeating to spend it worrying about the time we have lost   
• We should then set up a realistic plan for the time  that is left and put this on paper.
• We should consider what we are going to throw out of our current programme in-order to make our ACCA study plan a reality.(I believe that this is the most important part of the whole process). It is wrong to assume that you can stick to the same programme and achieve different results. What you give up may include your favourite TV show that you dedicate 1 hour to daily, or the Premier League matches that you have followed for the last 4 years, or that sweet morning sleep (4-6am). Well all I am saying is that there should be a clear sacrifice if we expect to spend the time that is left to June 2008 differently from the way we spent the time preceding today
• If possible, share these decisions with your accountability partner (friend, husband, wife, discussion group, mate etc) who shall keep reminding you of the decision that you made.

Today, you have over 30 days to transform a 20% to a 55% or even more. This is a lot of time and I believe that the decisions that you make now shall go a long way in giving you that victory in the June 2008 sitting. I would like to encourage those who may have lost hope that you are not out of this race by a long stretch. We just have to go back to the basics. We should not concentrate on what we don't have (eg time, study materials) but concentrate on what we have.

There are various resources at your disposal that you may not be optimising and it is your responsibility to identify them and put them to use. The articles in the Student Accountant, the lecture notes and exam kits seated in our rooms, the pass cards and many more resources at our disposal should be harnessed and exploited for our benefit. I discovered that the best place to find the articles in the student accountant is actually the ACCA website where they are arranged according to the respective papers.

Finally, I am reminded of my final sitting (December 2007) where I spent some of the time just before the exams sorting out a personal crisis and I was tempted to believe that I was heading for failure. During this time of confusion, the Lord strengthened me and reminded me of all the time that I had put in before and these few days of diversion would not deter my purpose. We can not accept to develop a sense of defeat. The most dangerous thing is to believe that you are not going to make it in June 2008 because if you do, you may indeed not make it. You have it in you to succeed and you have to build confidence coupled with great concentration, sacrifice and determination. Our concentration is greatly impaired by thinking about our inadequacies and I believe that if you take your eyes of the past and concentrate on optimising the time that is left, you shall certainly achieve that prestigious pass. You should do your best because your best is good enough