Long term study approach?

[Medgrant]

I won't the MCAT for another 7-8 months, but I'd like to hear everyone's opinions on how to approach studying so far out from the exam day.
What I've been doing is reading a chapter a day from the Kaplan set and typing bullet notes of almost all of the material. I alternate which book I use every chapter. I'd be covering more material every day, but taking notes takes me a decent amount of time.

I'll be taking a heavy course load until the end of the school year, so my plan was to finish all of the review material. (In other words, I will not be able to spend X hours daily for two months to study as suggested.)
Then, answer questions out of the EK 1001/101, TPR workbooks, going over the Khan videos, and using their passages. Lastly, about a month out, I wanted to start taking as many FLs as I can get my hands on to prep for test day and get my timing right.

Any suggestions or changes I should make? I feel like taking notes on the material is too slow, but considering how many months I have left, I don't want to read the material and then forget a lot of it. The notes would be a nice daily reference.

Does this seem like an efficient strategy? Any better ideas?

Thanks

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[Medgrant]

Bump. Really considering dropping the strategy of typing notes while reading. It's taking me too long. Roughly 3-4 hours a chapter. I feel like I would be 1/4 of the way through the review books by now if I just read. Then again, I don't know which is better.

 

[Halcyon32]

I'm in the same boat as you and am doing exactly the same things as you. I feel like taking notes is crucial even though it takes me probably even longer than you for each chapter and makes progress really slow. But that's the nice thing about taking the exam 7 months later. And like you said since it is far away we're likely to forget a lot of the subject matter so notes is a great idea in my opinion. On top of that I plan on just reading and rereading the chapters after finishing the prep book (i use EK and TPR simultaneously reading both chapters and then rereading EK and taking notes on this reread as well as taking notes on some khan academy vids). Obviously that takes a really long time and I spend a couple of days on just one chapter but after finishing all the chapters, rereading and reviewing will be a lot easier and keep the knowledge fresh in my mind. It might work for you this way as well. Also supplement your notes with flashcards, there are a decent amount of Anki flashcards for MCAT that you can just download and use and they're great for retaining and reviewing info long term.