Chemistry is three subjects wearing one name
Physical Chemistry is calculation: moles, equilibria, rates. Organic is logic: learn why a reaction happens and you can predict hundreds you have never seen. Inorganic is memory, propped up by periodic trends.
The classic mistake is to finish all of Physical, then all of Organic, then start Inorganic in the last months. By the time you reach the third, the first has faded - and Organic in particular punishes gaps, because every chapter is built from the one before it.
Run all three in parallel from day one. The orders below are what matters within each stream.
Physical Chemistry - the mole concept is not optional
Start with Some Basic Concepts, always. Stoichiometry is not a chapter you finish; it reappears inside Equilibrium, Solutions and Electrochemistry, and students who rushed it end up re-learning it three times under exam pressure.
Two dependencies are worth respecting. Thermodynamics before Equilibrium, because the equilibrium constant only makes sense once you understand Gibbs energy. And Redox before Electrochemistry, because a cell reaction is just a redox reaction with the halves pulled apart - oxidation numbers and half-reactions have to be automatic first.
📚 Chapters in this step - free notes & a chapterwise test for each:
Organic Chemistry - the one stream with a strict order
Organic has the least freedom of the three. Start with the Basic Principles chapter - inductive effect, resonance, hyperconjugation, carbocation stability, and how a mechanism is written. Skip it and every later chapter becomes memorisation, which is exactly why students find Organic impossible.
After that, follow the functional groups in the order the reactions themselves flow: haloalkanes give Grignard reagents, Grignards give alcohols, alcohols oxidise to aldehydes and ketones, those oxidise to carboxylic acids, and acid derivatives lead into amines. Study them in that sequence and each chapter hands you the starting material for the next. Study them out of order and you will meet reagents you have not learned yet.
📚 Chapters in this step - free notes & a chapterwise test for each:
Inorganic Chemistry - do not start here, but do not leave it last
Inorganic looks like pure memory, so students either front-load it and forget everything, or postpone it and run out of time. Both fail.
Do Periodicity and Chemical Bonding early - they sit in the Physical stream as much as the Inorganic one, and they explain the facts you would otherwise memorise blind. Why does ionisation enthalpy jump at a noble gas? Why is one oxide acidic and the next basic? Trends answer those, and answered facts stick.
Leave d- and f-Block and Coordination Compounds until Physical is comfortable, but start them early enough to revise three or four times. Inorganic is the one stream where repetition, not understanding, is the limiting factor.
📚 Chapters in this step - free notes & a chapterwise test for each:
How to run all three in the same week
A rotation that works, and survives a school timetable:
Organic every single day, in small doses. Mechanisms fade faster than anything else in Chemistry. Twenty minutes daily beats a four-hour session on Sunday - this is the single highest-return habit in the subject.
Physical on two or three days, in longer blocks, because numericals need uninterrupted time. Always finish with questions, never with reading; Physical is only learned by solving.
Inorganic in two short slots, treated as revision rather than study. Re-read what you covered last week, then test yourself. Do not read it for hours - you will not remember it, and you will feel like you failed.
Whatever you cover, take the chapterwise test the same day. The gap between recognising an answer and recalling it is where most Chemistry marks are lost, and only testing exposes it.