This plan is for one specific situation: your interview is about a week out and you cannot cover the whole syllabus. That's fine. You don't need all ten patterns to do well, you need to walk in knowing a handful cold instead of ten of them half-remembered. This plan picks the four patterns that show up the most, plus a mock run so the format itself isn't a surprise.

If your interview is more like a month out, the one-month plan covers every pattern. If you've got a few months, the three-month plan adds the extra practice problems too. Either way, you can build your own version of any of these at /plan, using your real dates and hours.

What one week is actually enough time for

The syllabus goes: Two Pointers, Sliding Window, Intervals, Linked List Manipulation, Modified Binary Search, Tree Breadth First Search, Graph Breadth First Search, Graph Depth First Search, Backtracking, and Dynamic Programming. This plan only covers the first four. That's not an arbitrary cut, it's the order the whole course teaches them in, and the earlier patterns tend to come up more often and take less setup to explain out loud.

The tradeoff is real: you'll skip six patterns entirely, plus every extra practice problem. If one of those six comes up in your actual interview, you'll be seeing it for the first time. That risk is the whole reason this is a "triage" plan and not just "the real plan but faster."

The day-by-day schedule

The numbers below assume a lesson takes about 40 minutes, an easy problem about 25, a medium about 40, and a hard about 55. That is what everything on the site is built around, so your actual pace will land somewhere close to this even if you're faster or slower on any one problem.

Day 1. Start with the two short reading pages, Start Here and Patterns Pyramid, about 15 minutes each. Then the Two Pointers lesson (40 min) and its first problem, Valid Palindrome, an easy one (25 min). About 1 hour 35 minutes total.

Day 2. The rest of Two Pointers: Sum of Three, Valid Palindrome II, and Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock, three mediums (40 min each), then Trapping Rain Water, a hard one (55 min). About 2 hours 55 minutes.

Day 3. The Sliding Window lesson (40 min) and all four of its core problems: Shortest Length Subarray Sum, an easy (25 min), Longest Substring Without Repeats and Fruit into Baskets, two mediums (40 min each), and Minimum Window Substring, a hard one (55 min). About 3 hours 20 minutes, the longest day in the plan.

Day 4. The Intervals lesson (40 min), then Meeting Rooms I, an easy (25 min), and Interval List Intersections, Merge Intervals, and Insert Interval, three mediums (40 min each). About 3 hours 5 minutes.

Day 5. The Linked List Manipulation lesson (40 min), Remove Repeats from Sorted List and Swap Nodes in Pairs, two easy ones (25 min each), Reverse Linked List II and Rotate List, two mediums (40 min each), and Palindrome Linked List, a hard one (55 min). About 3 hours 45 minutes.

Day 6. A mock interview (45 min), on the same page that walks you through how to run one solo or with a friend. Then pick your target company's guide from the guides page and read it, maybe 20 minutes, so their process and their favorite questions don't catch you off guard.

Day 7. Take the Practice Quiz (15 min) to see which of the four patterns is still shaky, and spend the rest of the day going back over whichever problem from the week gave you the most trouble. Interview day nerves are easier to handle when the last thing you did was something you already got right once.

What if I already know some of these patterns?

Skip whatever you're already solid on and use the freed-up time for the pattern that comes right after Linked List Manipulation. Modified Binary Search is usually the next best use of extra time if you finish early. Or just take the pattern recognition quiz first thing on day one. It will tell you exactly which patterns you already recognize, so you're not spending day two on something you didn't need.

Dates and hours differ for everyone. Build your own plan.

The planner leaves room for life getting in the way, so at the same hours it may trim a bit more than this page. If you want everything in, give it an hour or two more per week.