What do you do to optimize your study? It takes me about a month, sometimes over a month to pass each level simply by grinding and not reading the lessons. What can I do to optimize my studies?
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…Well, the first thing I’d recommend is reading the lessons. That’s generally a good idea.
Other things you can do to work faster is to do multiple review sessions a day, and follow the Ultimate Guide for WK.
But more importantly, why are you not reading the lessons?? I feel like that’s an issue to address before anything else.
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In the past I just skimmed the lessons, and was mortified to discover that my short-term memory conveniently forgot words or kanji readings or meanings that I had ‘learned’ minutes beforehand.
I’ve made a conscious decision to slow down, including reading (most of?) the context sentences - and, while I think that it has improved my learning, the jury is still out on that, because a day later I have forgotten some of the items that I thought I had solidly learned. But that’s where the SRS features come in to play.
I’ve also considered taking notes while going through the lessons, thinking that doing so might help to solidify my memory - but I haven’t actually done that yet.
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I have a notebook where I write each kanji, its meaning, and the readings. It helps me remember things.
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What is your current routine? What sorts of problems are you encountering?
Consistency is the key to progress. If you want go faster than 1 level per month, commit to doing at least 10–15 lessons per day, every single day. And do all your reviews every day (ideally 2 or 3 times per day, for Apprentice reviews).
At that pace, you’ll need to have somewhat high accuracy if you want to keep your review load manageable. One way to boost your accuracy is to use what you are learning, by regularly studying or consuming Japanese outside of WaniKani, even if it’s just 10 or 20 minutes per day. Going through levels faster will also help reinforce your memory, since you will be learning kanji and related vocab at the same time.
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um… 
Assuming you meant not reading them again before the reviews (some would call… cheating), mbrubeck is right - consistency. Do some lessons and all the reviews every day. There is such a thing as going too fast, but there is also such a thing as going too slow so instead of the reviews reminding and reinforcing at just the right time, they’re basically just having to re-learn over and over.
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