I started in mid-December and was done with CFAI Book 1 (Ethics etc) by end of year. January was a month to pick-up pace, and I’m now close to finising Book 2 (Behavioral, Individual & Institutional Investor), which is a long one. My aggressive but realistic plan is to finish my careful pass through the material (description below) by mid-April, leaving 6-7 weeks for review and practice.
My careful pass through the material consists of doing the following for each reading. Read CFAI text, underlying material/testable concepts, and making sure I understand examples (blue boxes, etc); then identify where each LOS is covered in the reading; and then re-read while taking notes in white paper - for each reading, my notes (with tiny handwriting) take 4 to 6 full (I mean, really crammed) 11x8.5 in pages, where I insert symbols and signs to help locate LOS and other high-level stuff that will be useful in my review stage. The plan is that I would not go back very often to the original CFAI text, except for revisiting blue-box examples as needed. Then doing a few exercises before moving on to the next reading.
This routine takes a non-trivial amount of effort and time, but an advantage is that the “note-writing” activity keeps me awake at night, while the first “read-highlight” activity is done during the day (during commute, lunch time,… a free minute is not wasted!). So in practice I start reading the next chapter while still taking notes on the current one, which also helps linking them together as applicable.
It looks like I’ll end up with some 150 dense pages of notes at the end of this stage, and the hope is that 6-7 weeks will be enough to review them while doing practice exams.