How I Studied for the CFA While Working Full Time

Nobody warns you about the Tuesdays.

Everyone talks about the 300 hours. They quote it like a fun fact. What they don't tell you is that those hours have to come from somewhere, and when you already have a job, "somewhere" is a Tuesday night after a nine-hour day when the last thing on earth you want to do is open a chapter on the time value of money.

I registered for CFA Level 1 while working full time in a job that was not remotely relaxing. I'm writing this because when I was starting out I went looking for an honest account of how to actually pull this off, and mostly I found either "just study 300 hours!" (thanks) or motivational nonsense from people who clearly had way more free time than me. So here's the real version.

First, I stopped pretending I'd study for three hours a night

I don't know who these people are who come home and grind for three hours. I have never been one of them and I never will be. The first two weeks I tried to be, felt like a failure every night I didn't, and then just... stopped opening the material at all. Classic.

The thing that actually turned it around was embarrassingly simple: I stopped scheduling study time I knew I wouldn't honor. I committed to a real number instead of an aspirational one. For me that was about 45 minutes on weeknights and a longer block on Sunday morning with coffee before the day got away from me. Some nights it was 20 minutes. That was fine. Twenty real minutes beats three imaginary hours every single time.

If you take one thing from this: build your plan around the life you actually have, not the disciplined robot you wish you were.

The commute and the "dead time" are where the exam is quietly won

I passed this exam mostly in the margins of my day. Not at a desk. On the train. Waiting for coffee. The ten minutes before a meeting started. Standing in line at the pharmacy.

Reading dense curriculum requires a desk and a clear head, sure. But practice questions don't. You can do five of them on your phone while you're waiting for the microwave. And here's the part that took me way too long to figure out — the practice questions are where you actually learn this stuff, not the reading. Reading felt productive. It gave me that warm "I'm studying" feeling. But when I finally sat a practice set I realized I'd retained almost none of it.

So I flipped it. Read less, drill more. Every wrong answer, I forced myself to figure out why the wrong choice was tempting, because that's exactly the trap they set on the real exam. Once I started treating every question as "what were they trying to get me to pick," the score jumped.

What I wasted time on (so you don't have to)

The full curriculum. It's like three thousand pages. I read maybe a third of it and I'd bet the people who read all of it didn't remember much more than I did. Skim it, drill it, go deep only where you're weak.

Pretty notes. I have a beautiful color-coded notebook from week one that I opened exactly never again. Making notes felt like studying. It wasn't. It was arts and crafts.

Ethics, at first. I saved it for the end like everyone tells you not to, and everyone is right. Ethics is something like 15–20% of the whole exam and it's very learnable points if you actually put the reps in. I almost gave those points away by treating it as an afterthought. Don't.

The consistency problem is the actual problem

Here's the honest truth: the CFA isn't that hard, conceptually. Most of it is not calculus. The hard part is showing up, a little bit, for months, when nothing about your day is pushing you to. Motivation shows up for about nine days and then ghosts you.

What kept me going was making it stupidly easy to start, and giving my brain a small reward for doing it. I'm a little embarrassed by how well a streak counter worked on me — the same dumb trick language apps use — but I'm not going to argue with results. On the nights I really didn't want to study, "don't break the streak" got me to open the thing, and once it's open you usually do more than you planned. I ended up building a big chunk of my routine around an app (I'll be transparent, it's the one this blog belongs to — Certus) precisely because it turned the reps into something I'd actually open on a Tuesday. Use whatever does that for you. The tool matters way less than the fact that you keep showing up.

Mocks. Do the mocks. Please do the mocks.

The single biggest jump in my scores came from full, timed mock exams. Not because I learned new material, but because sitting for 4.5 hours is its own skill. The first time I did a full mock I was mentally cooked by the second session and made dumb mistakes I never made on a 20-question set. Better to find that out in your living room than on exam day.

Do at least a couple of full-length, timed ones near the end. Treat them like the real thing — no phone, no pausing, no "I'll just look this one up."

What the last month looked like

The final stretch was almost entirely questions and review. I stopped reading new material about three weeks out and spent that time hammering my weak topics and doing mocks. I slept the night before instead of cramming, which felt irresponsible and was absolutely the right call. You cannot out-cram a bad night of sleep on a four-and-a-half-hour exam.

If you're staring down the same thing right now

You do not need to quit your life. You do not need the $2,000 course. You need a study plan built around your actual week, you need to practice from day one instead of just reading, you need to respect ethics, and you need some mechanism — a streak, a friend, a bribe to yourself, whatever — that gets you to open the material on the nights you don't want to.

That's genuinely it. Show up in the margins, drill more than you read, and don't break the chain. I did it with a full-time job and so can you.

Good luck. Go do five questions right now, while you're thinking about it.