It really depends on what subjects you are doing and how they are run. I study very differently in law subjects then I did for ancient history or languages.
The most generic thing is to do the readings (as many as possible) and make summaries from a combination of notes from lectures and readings. However even this can change depending on the assessment structure of the course
- ie. in ancient history subjects I knew that the end of semester exam would always be very broad eg. would have to write two essays, but could chose the questions from a range of about 10-20. Thus instead of writing summaries/studying the whole course, you could just pick four or five topics- you would to be pretty unlucky not to have a question related to those topics.
- law exams on the other hand generally covered all content, so you wanted to have summaries for the whole course. However law outlines also tend to be more detailed, with dot points or headings of what the lecture is going to teach you- and it is good to work of these in terms of making notes if they are there.
My advice would be to keep up on the readings, and try to write summaries every couple of weeks. However, like most people, you may fall behind on this- either not doing all the readings or not writing summaries etc. You just have to catch up when closer towards the end of semester.
(i'm three weeks in, and already behind on all readings! and summaries). From then on, just work on whats highest priority- ie. if you have a mid-semester exam, use that to get all your notes for that subject up to date etc.