My colleague Deepak sits three desks away from me at the content agency where I work part-time. He is 27 years old, earns ₹32,000 per month, and has been preparing for the IBPS PO exam for the past fourteen months without telling most people at the office.
He wakes up at 4:50 AM every day. He studies from 5:15 to 7:00 AM before getting ready for work. He eats lunch at his desk while listening to current affairs podcasts with one earphone in. He studies again from 9:00 to 11:00 PM after dinner. On Saturdays he is at the Saket District Library by 8:00 AM and stays until 1:00 PM.
I found out about his preparation accidentally three months ago when I noticed him solving Quantitative Aptitude questions on his phone during a team outing that most of us were treating as a holiday. When I asked him about it he was quiet for a moment and then told me everything — the schedule, the plan, the two previous attempts, the score improvements, the goal. He had cleared the IBPS Prelims in his second attempt with a score of 74 out of 100. He is targeting the Mains this cycle.
He has never taken a study leave. He has never missed a work deadline. His manager has no idea.
I also know Shruti — a schoolteacher in Laxmi Nagar who cleared the SSC CGL Tier 1 in 2023 on her third attempt while teaching Class 8 and 9 English at a private school. And I know Rahul from my neighbourhood in Pitampura who cleared the Delhi Police SI exam in 2022 while working night shifts at a BPO in Gurugram — sleeping from 8 AM to 2 PM, studying from 2 PM to 8 PM, leaving for work at 9 PM.
Three different people. Three different exams. Three different working situations. One consistent pattern across all of them that this article is about.
The Mistake That Eliminates Most Working Candidates Before They Begin
Every working candidate I have spoken to — and over the past two years since Deepak told me about his preparation I have had this conversation with at least a dozen people — starts with the same wrong assumption.
They assume that to compete with full-time students who study eight to ten hours a day, they need to somehow find eight to ten hours in a day that already has a job in it. When they cannot manage this, they feel like failures. The guilt of not studying enough accumulates until it poisons the hours they do manage to study. Many give up not because they ran out of time but because they could not make peace with having less time than they believed they needed.
Deepak told me something in that first conversation that I have thought about many times since. He said: “The full-time student in Rajinder Nagar coaching centre is studying ten hours a day and retaining maybe 40 percent of it because he is exhausted and distracted. I am studying four hours a day and retaining 80 percent of it because every session is deliberate and I cannot afford to waste it.”
His point was not that working candidates have an advantage — they clearly do not in terms of raw hours. His point was that scarcity of time, managed correctly, produces a quality of focus that excess time rarely does.
You are not trying to match full-time students hour for hour. You are trying to outscore them on exam day. These are different objectives.
Step 1: Choose One Exam and Commit Completely
The single most common pattern I see among working candidates who fail repeatedly is splitting preparation across multiple exams. UPSC and SSC CGL simultaneously. IBPS PO and SBI Clerk at the same time. State PSC alongside a central services exam.
The logic feels sound — overlapping syllabus, one preparation for multiple opportunities. In practice it produces shallow preparation for everything and sufficient preparation for nothing.
Shruti attempted her first SSC CGL while also preparing loosely for the Delhi Teacher Eligibility Test. Her score in both was below cutoff. In her second attempt she focused only on SSC CGL. Her Tier 1 score improved by 23 marks. In her third attempt — still only SSC CGL — she cleared.
When I asked her what changed between attempts one and two besides dropping the second exam, she said: “Attempt one I was reading everything. Attempt two I was studying one thing. The difference felt like the difference between swimming in a lake and swimming in a lane.”
Pick one. Give it one full year. Reassess based on results.
Step 2: Build Your Schedule Around Real Windows — Not Ideal Ones
Deepak showed me his daily schedule once when we were discussing it. It was written on the notes app on his phone and he had been updating it for fourteen months. What struck me was how different it was from the aspirational schedules I had seen posted in UPSC and SSC preparation groups on Facebook — the ones with eight colour-coded study blocks spread through the day.
His schedule had three windows:
5:15 AM to 7:00 AM — Mathematics and Reasoning. His explanation: “My mind is cleanest at this time. I use it for the subjects that require the most thinking. Never current affairs in the morning — that is passive reading and does not need my best hours.”
12:45 PM to 1:30 PM — Current Affairs and General Knowledge during lunch. He listens to Study IQ’s daily current affairs audio while eating at his desk, then spends fifteen minutes reading two or three articles on Inshorts or the Hindu app.
9:00 PM to 11:00 PM — English and Subject Revision. He reviews whatever he covered in the morning and does 30 to 40 practice questions.
Total: approximately 4 hours on weekdays.
Saturday morning: 5 hours at the library for a full-length mock test followed by two hours of analysis.
Sunday: 3 to 4 hours of weak area focus based on what the Saturday mock revealed.
Weekly total: approximately 27 to 29 hours. Enough. More than enough if used with intent.
The principle underlying his schedule: identify the windows that genuinely exist in your day and build around them. Not the windows you wish existed. The windows that are actually, reliably available to you five days a week without disrupting the job or the family or the sleep.
For Rahul at the BPO — working nights — those windows were completely different: 2 PM to 8 PM, with no commute time and no morning alarms. Same principle, completely different schedule. Both worked.
Step 3: Prioritise the High-Weightage Areas Ruthlessly
Deepak carries a small notebook in his bag — not for notes but for a single page at the front that he updates after every mock test. It shows the percentage weightage of each subject in IBPS PO Prelims and which subjects have the highest gap between his current accuracy and the required accuracy.
Three months ago that page showed: Quantitative Aptitude — 35% weightage, accuracy 58%, target 75%. English Language — 30% weightage, accuracy 72%, target 80%. Reasoning Ability — 35% weightage, accuracy 69%, target 75%.
He spent 55% of his study time on Quantitative Aptitude for the next eight weeks. Not because it was his favourite subject — it was his weakest. Because the weightage justified the time and the gap justified the urgency.
This is the discipline that separates working candidates who clear from those who do not. When you have four hours a day and not ten, every hour must justify itself against every other possible use of that hour. Studying what you already know well feels productive. It is not. Studying your weakest high-weightage area feels uncomfortable. It is the only thing that moves the score.
For SSC CGL: Quantitative Aptitude and English together constitute approximately 50% of Tier 1 marks. For IBPS PO Prelims: Reasoning and Quantitative Aptitude together are 70% of marks. For UPSC Prelims: General Studies Paper 1 alone carries 200 marks with no sectional cutoffs. Know the weightage of your specific exam. Allocate your time accordingly.
Step 4: Treat Commute Time as Dedicated Study Time
Deepak commutes 40 minutes each way on the Delhi Metro between Pitampura and Saket. That is 80 minutes per day, 400 minutes per week — nearly 7 hours — that most working candidates in Delhi lose to phones and scrolling.
He does not study anything that requires writing during his commute. He listens. Study IQ Daily Current Affairs on the way to work. On the way back he either listens to a vocabulary podcast or does mental arithmetic — running through multiplication tables, percentage calculations, number series — as a warm-up for the evening session.
The commute study is not his primary preparation. It is reinforcement and it is efficient because it costs no additional time — it replaces time that was previously going nowhere.
Shruti’s commute was shorter — 20 minutes each way on a bus in East Delhi. She used it for flashcard revision on an app called Anki where she had loaded vocabulary, history dates, and current affairs facts. Twenty minutes twice a day, five days a week. She estimates this contributed 15 to 20 percent of her General Knowledge preparation without any extra time investment.
Step 5: The Mock Test Is Not Practice — It Is Diagnosis
The most significant difference between Deepak’s first IBPS attempt and his second was not how much he studied. It was how he used mock tests.
In his first attempt he took mock tests and checked his score. 68 out of 100. 71 out of 100. 66 out of 100. He noted the scores and moved on.
In his second attempt cycle he spent equal time on the post-test analysis as on the test itself. For every wrong answer he asked three questions: Did I not know the concept or did I know it but make an error? If I did not know it, is this a high-weightage topic? If I made an error, what type of error — calculation mistake, misread question, negative marking from uncertainty?
He tracked these patterns in a simple Google Sheet over twelve consecutive mocks. By mock eight he could see clearly: he was losing 11 to 13 marks per test from calculation errors in Data Interpretation — not from not knowing the method but from rushing. He spent the next three weeks exclusively on DI speed drills.
His Prelims score: 74. The cutoff that cycle: 65.
The mock test is not a measure of how much you know. It is a diagnostic tool that tells you exactly where your next hour of study will produce the most improvement. Use it that way.
Managing the Part Nobody Talks About Honestly
Deepak has not told his parents he is preparing for IBPS. They live in Rohtak and believe he is content in his content writing job. He has not told them because he does not want to manage their hope and anxiety alongside his own. He plans to tell them if he clears the Mains.
Shruti’s husband knew and her parents knew. She says the accountability was helpful but the pressure sometimes was not — particularly after her second failed attempt when family conversations about “when will you leave this sarkari exam drama” became difficult to navigate.
Rahul told nobody except his closest friend until the day he got the appointment letter.
There is no single right answer to how much to share and with whom. What all three people agreed on when I asked them: do not share your preparation with people who will treat each attempt result as evidence for a verdict about whether you should continue. Share with people who will support the process without requiring guaranteed outcomes.
On Leaves — Use Them Before the Exam, Not After
This is the specific practical advice that Deepak gave me that I have not seen written anywhere else.
He used three days of leave in the ten days before his IBPS Prelims — a Thursday and Friday the week before, and the Monday of exam week. He used these three days for full-length mock tests under real exam conditions in the morning and weak area revision in the afternoon. He went into the exam having simulated the experience three extra times in the preceding ten days.
His manager approved the leave without question. He said he needed some personal time. He was not lying.
The instinct of most working candidates is to save leave for after the exam — to give themselves recovery time or celebration time. Deepak’s point was direct: you do not need leave after the exam. You need it before, when it will actually change your score.
A Final Word
Deepak’s IBPS PO Mains result comes out in six weeks as I am writing this. He does not know yet whether he will clear.
What he does know — and what he told me in the library last Saturday after we had both been there for different reasons for three hours — is that the fourteen months of 5 AM alarms and metro commute flashcards and Saturday mock tests have changed how he approaches every difficult thing. Not just the exam. Everything.
“I used to think discipline was a personality trait,” he said. “Like some people had it and some people did not. Now I think it is a muscle. You build it by doing small difficult things at the same time every day until the difficulty stops being the point.”
Whether or not he clears this cycle, he has built something that will not go away.
That is what government exam preparation as a working professional actually is. Not a test of how much you know. A test of whether you can build that muscle under conditions that most people would use as an excuse not to.
Alen is a Delhi-based writer covering career development, personal finance, and health topics for Indian audiences since 2020. Two of his colleagues and one childhood friend from Pitampura have prepared for government competitive exams while working, and this article is drawn from those conversations as much as from general research.
Alen is a Delhi-based writer covering personal finance, health, and career topics for Indian audiences. He has been writing about practical financial and lifestyle topics since 2020 and believes that clear, honest information should be accessible to every Indian regardless of background