Time Saving Tips

• Don't overdo it. It is hardly ever a sensible plan to work until you drop, and if you end up working in irregular and infrequent binges you'll inevitably under perform, to say nothing of that background feeling of being vaguely out of control.
• Pace yourself and establish a functional upper limit to the length of time you can
  concentrate before the effort starts to outweigh the benefits.
• Find strategies for dealing with the times when you know your concentration isn't going to hold up. Make a note of places you couldn't quite follow what you heard or read, so that you can come back to it when you're fresher.
• Look for a way to make it easy to get back into something you're reading even if you have to take a break. It can sometimes be helpful to force yourself to break off mid-chapter, mid-paragraph or even mid-idea, so as to make it easier to pick up the threads again later, rather than trying to plunge in 'cold' to a totally new topic or chapter. Find out what works for you.
• Find smaller tasks that will occupy you in 'between' times - e.g. that slightly-less-than-a- free-hour between two lectures. Maybe you're working on a particular article or book chapter, or are doing some practice at transcribing diphthongs, or whatever. But give yourself a task that can realistically be done in the time you allot yourself.
• Keep ahead of the game: as much as you can, try to read before the relevant lecture rather than after it. There's a world of difference between reading ahead and therefore having the ideas already formed in your mind when you hear the lecturer dissecting them, and on the other hand reading in a kind of 'remedial' way, to try to puzzle out what on earth was being talked about in a lecture you weren't really able to follow. It doesn't involve much more effort for this to work; it's just a question of getting the timing right.

The moral of the story: there's a world of difference between being on top of things and playing catch-up all the time, and keeping a watchful eye on how you make use of your own time can be enough to tip the balance the right way.

Text adapted with permission from 'Study Skills in Linguistics' by Martin Barry