A mains paper does not stop for anyone. Three hours sounds generous until you are forty minutes into a question you thought would take twenty, watching the clock, with two more questions still unattempted and a growing sense that the paper is now managing you rather than the other way round. Legal knowledge gets most of the credit and most of the preparation time, but in-exam time management is a separate, learnable skill, and it is very often the actual difference between a mains score that reflects real preparation and one that does not.
Read the whole paper before writing a single word
The instinct under pressure is to start writing the moment reading is allowed, usually on the first question, because starting feels like progress. A better first move, costing perhaps three to five minutes, is to read every question on the paper once, noting roughly how confident you feel about each and how many marks it carries. This does two things. It stops you from over-investing in an early question only to discover a stronger one further down that now has too little time left for it, and it gives you an actual, informed basis for the time allocation you are about to make, rather than a guess made question by question as you go.
Allocate time by marks, not by how much you know
The natural pull is to spend the most time on questions where you know the most, because writing feels easy and satisfying there. This is exactly backward from an efficient strategy. A question worth few marks does not become worth more marks because you happen to have a great deal to say about it. Decide, before writing, roughly how many minutes each question deserves based on its marks relative to the whole paper, and treat that allocation as a real constraint, not a loose suggestion you abandon the moment a topic excites you.
Build in a genuine buffer, and protect it
Reserve some real time, ten to fifteen minutes on a typical mains paper, that is not assigned to any specific question. This is not wasted time. It exists to absorb the inevitable moment when one question runs slightly over its allocation, which will happen, so that the overrun does not cascade into every question after it running short. Aspirants who plan every single minute with no slack tend to watch a small, early delay compound into a genuinely rushed, weak final answer, simply because there was never any room in the plan to absorb it.
When you are running out of time on a question, stop and move on
This is the hardest discipline to actually practise, because it feels like giving up on an answer you have already invested effort into. But a half-finished, over-length answer to one question, at the cost of an unattempted question elsewhere on the paper, is a worse outcome than a shorter, complete answer to both. If your allocated time for a question is up and you are not finished, write a brief, clear concluding line and move on. An unattempted question scores zero. A slightly shorter but complete one does not.
Practise this under real timed conditions, not just once
Time management under exam pressure is not something you can reliably plan for in the abstract and then execute correctly for the first time on the actual exam day. It needs to be practised, ideally using previous year papers or full-length mock tests solved under genuinely timed conditions, so that the discipline of reading first, allocating deliberately, and moving on when time is up becomes a practised habit rather than a plan you are trying to follow for the first time while also under real exam pressure.