College Time Management Strategy: The Four C's That Help Your Learn Faster College students with good time management skills are able to study smarter so they can study less and remember more. These tips, from "College Success Your Way: What Your Professors Won't Tell You and Your Friends Don't Know," by Crystal Jonas Bevans, are part of the chapter on how to get better grades with less effort. Keep these four C's in mind and make learning new material for your classes, and reviewing for your tests, much easier.

The ideal way to learn faster begins with four C's. Before you jump right in to all that reading, and as you've learned by now, you will have a ton of reading to do in college, and before you sit down to a huge pile of books and notes to study prepare yourself to read and recall this material as quickly and easily as possible. There are four C's to prepare you for accelerated learning.

Be sure you are:

1. Comfortable2. Confident3. Clear4. Curious First, make sure you can read in a comfortable place. The more technical the information is, the more important this point is. You can read a great fiction novel standing in a blizzard at a bus stop and never notice the weather. I can't say that you'd equally tuned out to your surroundings if the book in your hand wasn't the latest bestseller but that super-sized world history text.

Ideally, sit in a padded upright chair. Yes, it does have to be an upright chair. You and I both know what's going to happen in you prop yourself up on your bed to tackle this task. You'll stretch out with your highlighters, textbook and the best intentions, and before you know it, your alarm clock is waking you up for your first morning class.

Know the difference between getting comfortable and getting casual.

If you stretch out on your bed, propped up against several pillows, your mind thinks you're not real serious about this whole study thing. The whole lie-down-on-the-bed, go-to-sleep pattern is pretty deeply engrained. Make sure you are sitting up and ready to read. Choose a chair with a straight back and your brain will get that you are getting down to business. Try it yourself. You may be surprised at the difference it makes in helping you stay alert and focused.

Second, be confident in your ability to learn anything and everything you need to know to be successful. This book may be the first time you've been exposed to the information about how powerful your mind is. You truly do have the mind of a genius. You've got over 10 billion brain cells, remember? All you need to do is find out how to use all of that mind power, and then put it to use to make learning easier and a lot more fun.

Third, when you're preparing yourself to learn quickly, be clear about what you want to understand and recall. Think about what the syllabus says the class is going to be about. Create some questions that will help you make the most of the time you spend reading and reviewing the material. The more specific you are about what you want to learn, the easier it will be to focus in on exactly what you want, and skim over what you don't need to know.

Finally, be curious. Curiosity implies that you actually want to learn about the topic. It puts you in the driver's seat for studying, and let's you know that you are actually spending all this time on this topic because you're interested. Curiosity also keeps you open minded to learn new concepts. Curiosity allows you to ask many specific questions. These will focus your attention and prepare you to quickly recognize the answer when you come across it.

This little bit of mental preparation is a tremendous time management tool that will allow you to learn much more with less effort. Use it to make your college classes easier.