I'm in my third year of high school and I put off studying until now, with about 2 months left until the ENEM. I've been working during the day and can only study at night. What's the best strategy to focus on the subjects that come up most often and not waste time?
The most important thing is to create a realistic schedule for your nights and not try to do everything at once - I've seen people completely burn out because they wanted to make up for 3 years in 60 days. I started studying some new stuff while tending to my garden at night (yeah, it's possible to mix them), and I realized that reviewing a subject you've already seen is way faster than learning from scratch, so prioritize subjects you're decent at and brush up on them. Do full practice tests online every week or so to train your mental endurance, because the ENEM is exhausting - it'll help you see which topics you're really weak in. And honestly, with work during the day, what's really valuable is studying smartly for like 2-3 hours straight at night rather than 5 hours while distracted.
Analyze previous ENEM exams to know exactly what shows up most in each subject - that's your golden ticket so you don't waste time on random topics. Math and languages usually have pretty clear repetition patterns, so study the questions from recent years and identify the topics that appear most frequently. Make a checklist of that and prioritize: if a topic appeared in 5 exams over the past years, study that before breaking your head over something that showed up once.
With just 2 months and studying at night, forget about trying to cover everything. Build a focused schedule: separate the topics by subject, put the most frequent ones in the first half of your time and save the second half for reviewing and doing full practice tests. Each day, pick one specific topic and do exercises on just that - don't jump around because you won't learn anything properly. Like, Monday do geometry, Tuesday do equations, Wednesday do text interpretation... that way you stay really focused.
Another thing that works: do online practice tests or print old exams and take them without looking anything up, timing yourself exactly like it's the real exam. That shows you if you're keeping up with the pace and where you're still weak. At first it can be discouraging to see the score, but you'll quickly see the difference when you're studying with a purpose. Two months is short, yeah, but it's totally possible to improve a lot if you focus on the right points instead of studying everything scattered.
Two months is doable, but it's not a miracle - the real secret is being realistic about the time you've got. Focusing only on what comes up most is a trap because ENEM loves testing interpretation and connections between topics, not just isolated formulas. What worked best for me was taking old exams, solving one over the course of an entire week (not just reading through) and then analyzing where I kept making the same mistakes, not just isolated topics. If you work during the day, study at night but do it focused - half an hour of solid studying beats three hours of scrolling through exercises without any concentration.
What worked for me was focusing on 3-4 subjects per week instead of trying to cover everything, because when you only have nights free it's way too easy to panic and just stop studying. What actually helped me was getting old ENEM tests (there's a ton of them available) and doing real questions instead of just reading summaries, because you figure out fast where the actual difficulty is and not just where you think you should be studying.
Another thing: if you're working during the day, your nights are limited anyway, so move faster through the stuff you already kind of get and put serious time only into what you really don't understand. And don't leave all the old tests for a week before the ENEM - start now and use them as a guide to see if you're actually improving.
are you studying at night even though you're exhausted from work, or can you grab half an hour before you leave? because honestly, two months with partial nights is tight but totally doable - the thing is not trying to be perfect at everything! grab the last 5 ENEM exams, mark those topics that repeat way too much (like those math graphs, text interpretation that always shows up), and focus hard on those - you'll get to the rest if you have energy left. people who try to memorize EVERYTHING burn out, and then they bomb anyway, so stick with what actually scores points!
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