Timing the 60 minutes

You get sixty minutes for both tasks and no extra time for anything. Nearly every timing problem in IELTS Writing is one of two things: the wrong split, or no plan for what to abandon when the split fails.

Where the minutes go

The official recommendation is twenty minutes for Task 1 and forty for Task 2, and the table is just that split with the reading and checking made explicit rather than assumed. Nothing above is a rule from the exam board. It is a budget, and budgets are meant to be adjusted once you know your own pace.

The five minutes people skip

Planning Task 2 is the first thing dropped under pressure and the last thing that should be. Five minutes deciding your position and your two or three body paragraphs buys back more than five minutes of writing, because you stop mid-essay far less often.

It also prevents the most expensive Task 2 failure there is, which is not a language problem at all: not delivering everything the prompt asked for. You cannot notice a missing deliverable at minute 54.

A plan does not need to be prose. Three lines of notes is a plan.

Should you write Task 2 first?

This gets argued about, and I think yes, for most people.

Task 2 carries two thirds of your Writing band. If you run out of time, the cheap thing to sacrifice is the task worth a third, not the task worth two thirds. Writing Task 2 while you are fresh and have the whole hour in front of you puts your best attention on the more valuable half.

The condition where this is wrong: if you have ever started Task 2 and looked up to find forty-five minutes gone, do not do it. The order only helps if you can stop writing Task 2 on schedule, and people who overrun are usually the same people who reach for this tactic. A hard stop at minute forty, whichever task you began with, matters more than the order does.

When you are already behind

This is the part worth deciding in advance, because at minute fifty you will not decide it well.

If you reach minute 50 with Task 2 clearly unfinished, the priority order is:

1. Reach the word count. Being under 250 caps Task Response regardless of quality — see the word count guide. An unpolished essay above the line beats a polished one below it.
2. Answer every part of the prompt, even in one sentence each. A thin answer to the whole question scores better than a full answer to half of it.
3. Write a conclusion, briefly. One sentence stating your position is enough. A response that simply stops reads as unfinished.
4. Then worry about vocabulary and sentence variety.

Notice that proofreading is not on that list. If you are genuinely out of time, new words on the page are worth more than corrections to the words already there — which inverts the advice you would give someone with ten minutes spare.

Two practical notes

On computer-delivered IELTS there is a word counter. On paper there is not, so work out roughly how many words you write per line, once, in practice. Counting words during the exam is a bad use of the only resource you are short of.

And practise against a clock at least a few times before test day. Writing 250 words untimed tells you nothing about whether you can write 250 words in thirty minutes, and those are different skills.