Apart from differences in study habits and personality, the amount of time that you are able to allocate to test preparation is another big differentiating factor. Are you in a relationship? Do you have a busy social schedule? Do you work 70 hour weeks? Do you have kids or other people depending on you? The answer to these questions varies for all of us, and they clearly have a profound impact on our strategy for success come exam day. If you are time constrained and attempt to pursue an ambitious study plan, you are likely to get stressed out and fall behind schedule.
How many hours do you really have available to read through the curriculum?
It seems obvious, but the first question to ask yourself is therefore “how much time you can realistically commit to reading the level 1 CFA® exam curriculum?” How many weeks in advance are you planning to begin your studies? Think about a typical week. When are you planning to study? During your commute? -evenings? -weekends? Add up the amount of hours you can reasonably commit during a standard week (then probably deduct a few hours for unanticipated distractions). Most candidates tend to focus on answering questions during the last 4 weeks prior to the exam, so if you are planning to do so also, you should obviously exclude these 4 weeks from you calculation. When you have your weekly number (e.g. 20 hours), simply multiply with the number of weeks minus 4 (If you are studying 20 weeks that would be (20-4)*20 = 320 hours). For some people this may seem like a blatantly obvious thing to do, but I think a lot of people never really run through this kind of calculation to see how much time they are really committing.
Do you have time enough?
Now this is not a recommendation by the way, 320 hours is just in excess of the suggested average of 300+ hours for passing candidates (and these 300 hours are meant to cover everything including question practice). How many hours you actually need to get through the curriculum clearly depends on your reading speed and study plan. I will deal with this question in another post. You can also reverse engineer the process. If e.g. you know that you have only got 12 weeks to study before question practice, and you estimate that you need to complete 300 hours of studying to have a reasonable chance to get through the curriculum, then you will need to study 300/12 = 25 hours every week. It may or may not be realistic for you to commit this kind of study time on top of everything else. If you are working long hours and have other commitments on top something clearly has to give.