College life can be fun, exciting, and prepare you for a great career. To make the most of your time in college, be sure to manage your time well so you can make good grades and still have time for a life. These college time management tips will help you study smarter go you can keep your grades up and still have time for a life.

As the author of four college success guides and a college speaker, one of my main goals is to help college students use their time well so they can make the grade and have time to enjoy college life. College is about more than academics. So, be sure to get those study tips mastered quickly, so you have some time to have a balanced college experience.

Here are five reasons prepping for class makes learning a whole lot easier.

SHAVE HOURS OFF FUTURE STUDY TIME.

Prime your mind to store and retain information by making sure you read the required material before you go to class.

1. Big Picture Overview primes memory Our memory works by associating new ideas with old ones. When you read the assignment, and review the notes from last class, you pave the way for new information to be connected with this big picture concept that you've just studied.

It gives our mind an overall picture of what the main themes of the class will be. Our brains naturally store and recall information more effectively when we start with a big picture concept of the key ideas, and then fill in with specific examples and applications.

2. You'll recognize and understand key terms more readily. Remember, understanding key terms, and their interconnection with key concepts is the basis for taking brief, memorable notes. For example, say your Psychology class is studying Freud. You need to know about the ego, superego, and the id, and when Freud says the develop. Reviewing ahead of time, you've primed you mind to pick up on your teacher's mentioning any of these key terms. You will be able to listen more carefully, and to take more meaningful notes on how these three concepts influence each other and psychological development.

3. It allows note taking shorthand. Read ahead allows to check off directly in your book when the teacher covers something that is in there. Those unprepared will be writing like mad; you'll simply be putting a symbol beside anything the teacher mentions that's in the book. I recommend the letter "c" with a circle around it, so you can quickly notice that this is information covered in class. Anything mentioned both in the book and in the classroom is worth making a special note of.

4. It primes active listening Finally, coming prepared sets you up for active listening. That allows you to take fewer notes, because now you are ready to pick up the few keywords that contain most of the meaning in the lecture.

Let me cover the concept of key words in more depth here.

Say you just saw a great movie and you want to tell some friends about it. How much do you tell them? Certainly, not all the dialogue, nothing word for word would even make it into your description, unless there was a particularly clever one-liner.

Nope, you'd stick with the synopsis, just the highlights. You would condense a 2 hour show into a 5 minute description.

The review you would give the move contains the essence of the key words. That's exactly what you'll want to write down when you're taking notes.

5. Prep makes taking notes a lot easier. Perhaps the best way to take notes is a process of 3 dimensional, one-page note taking, sometimes called brain webs or mind maps. In this process, the central idea is placed in the middle, and the main themes radiate outward with subcategories attached to their respective themes.