Find out where your study time actually goes.

"I studied all day" is almost never true

Sit down at nine, get up at six, and it feels like nine hours of study. It rarely is. The half hour before you actually started, the session you cut short, the one you skipped entirely because the previous one overran — none of that registers at the time. By the end of the week the honest figure and the remembered figure can differ by ten hours or more.

That gap is the single most fixable problem in exam preparation, and almost nothing measures it. A timer records the hours you did study. It has no idea about the ones you meant to.

How the gap is measured

Every session in your plan has a scheduled length. The timer records what you actually studied. The difference between the two is your wastage for that session — a 90-minute slot with 50 minutes of real study leaves 40 minutes unaccounted for.

Because it's measured per session rather than per day, you find out where the time went, not just that it went. One session bleeding thirty minutes every day is a very different problem from thirty minutes scattered thinly across six.

Missed, partial, completed

Each day sorts your sessions into three groups, and the shape of that split tells you what to fix:

• Missed — the scheduled time passed and you studied none of it. A lot of these usually means your plan is scheduled at hours you don't really have.
• Partial — you started but didn't finish. A lot of these is a pacing or concentration problem, not a scheduling one.
• Completed — the full planned time, done.

Two students can both lose three hours a day and need completely opposite fixes. The split is what tells them apart.

Today at a glance, and the trend underneath

The day's view shows studied against wasted time as a single breakdown, with each leaking session listed and the share of its slot you lost. Underneath sits a day-by-day history for the plan you're following, and that's the part that matters most — no single day means much, but a gap that narrows across three weeks is real progress, and one that widens is a warning you'd otherwise miss.

It doesn't punish you for resting

Wastage is only recorded for a plan on days you actually studied it. Take a day off, sit an exam, fall ill, and nothing is logged. This is deliberate: a tracker that reports eight wasted hours every time you take a legitimate break teaches you to close the tracker, not to study more.

For the same reason it measures the gap and stops there. It doesn't watch which apps you opened or what you did instead — that isn't its business. If you want distractions blocked while a session runs, Focus Shield on Android does that, separately and only if you turn it on.

Works for any exam, anywhere

Nothing here is exam-specific. Lighthouse Prep is used for UPSC, SSC, banking, TNPSC and railway preparation, but a scheduled session compared against real study time means exactly the same thing whether you're preparing for a civil-services paper, a medical entrance, a professional qualification or a university finals week. Set your own plan and the measurement works the same way.