Writing: Planning Time Management for Task 1 and Task 2

Planning before you write is not the same as planning what you'll say about the topic — it's the specific five-minute window before your pen or cursor touches the actual essay, where you decide the shape of the response you're about to produce. The mistake pattern this article addresses is distinct from running out of time mid-essay or missing the word count: it's candidates who sit down, read the prompt, and start writing sentence one immediately, discovering their real structure only as they go — often realising two paragraphs in that their second point actually contradicts their first, or that they've used their strongest example in the introduction and have nothing left for the body. Planning time isn't a nice-to-have that better-prepared candidates add on top of good writing; it's the mechanism that prevents an essay from wandering, doubling back on itself, or running out of things to say exactly when a fourth paragraph is structurally required.

For Task 2, a genuine planning phase of three to five minutes inside the 40-minute allocation should answer three questions in a fixed order, before a single sentence of the essay itself is written. First: what type of question is this, exactly — opinion, discuss-both-views, problem-solution, advantage-disadvantage, or two-part — since the structure you'll use depends entirely on this classification, not on the topic. Second: what is your actual position or answer, stated to yourself in one plain sentence, not a vague impression you'll firm up as you write. Third: what two or three specific, developed points will you use to support that position, each with a concrete example or piece of reasoning already sketched, even if only in three or four words per point. Skipping straight to writing without settling all three of these first is what produces essays that technically have paragraphs but don't actually argue anything coherent from start to finish.

A useful physical habit for this planning phase is jotting a skeleton, not full sentences — for a discuss-both-views prompt on whether social media does more harm or good to teenagers, a workable five-line skeleton looks like: "View 1: connects isolated teens, examples of interest communities. View 2: anxiety from comparison, sleep disruption, documented mental health research. My view: benefits real but outweighed by mental health cost for younger teens specifically." Six lines, thirty seconds to write, and it already tells you your introduction's shape, your two body paragraphs' content, and your conclusion's direction — all decided before you've written a single sentence of actual prose, which means you can focus your remaining 35 minutes purely on expressing these already-decided ideas well, rather than discovering them as you write.

For Task 1, the planning phase is shorter — one to two minutes is usually enough — but skipping it is just as costly, because Task 1's overview requirement makes planning almost mechanical if you do it in the right order. The first planning step is identifying the two or three overview-worthy features: not every trend in the chart, just the ones that dominate the overall picture. For a line graph showing internet usage across four age groups from 2000 to 2020, an overview-level observation might be "usage rose across all groups, but the gap between the youngest and oldest groups widened dramatically" — a single sentence capturing the shape of the whole chart, decided before you write a single body paragraph. The second planning step is a rough allocation of which specific figures belong in which body paragraph, so you're not deciding this mid-sentence and accidentally omitting a category or repeating one.