I don't know about using the canned briefs. Never used them in law school. I just read for class and took a few notes here and there. But the reading should speed up the more familiar you become with this type of material. It is not unlike learning a foreign language. This is usually around the time when it starts to click for many people.
Everybody is different, but as much as I didn't use the commercial briefs, I liked a couple of the commercial outlines for review. Particularly those from West and then BarBri (I think West Bar Review is long gone so they might not make those materials any longer). Regardless, I never made any outlines. Started a couple of times trying to make them and then gave up. They always ended up looking like the TOC of the book. I wasn't going to learn the material through outlines, but if I already knew it, then those were a great help for review.
I can't really say much about practice tests. Those (I don't think) didn't exist back in my day. I'm not sure those would have done me any good either. I'm presuming your grade in most classes is from one comprehensive final. At the halfway point, would you still have to learn the other half of the material before you can practice test it? I'm probably not fully picturing what you're doing for practice tests and how those work.
You will always have to read for class. It's just that the process of going through the material speeds up. What's relevant and not relevant is much easier to spot so that makes sorting through everything easier. But it still has to be done. I don't know of any shortcuts through that process.
But you've probably noticed that a lot of your classmates quit writing out case briefs for class. Or it's become 100 times simplified to where it's a few scribbled notes. Or done in the book itself. You all have pretty much figured out that trying to memorize everything is a waste of time and can't be done.
Glad to see that you're figuring out what does and does not work for you. Now you still have half a semester to catch your breath and get comfortable before you find out in December that whatever it is that worked for you did not even begin to adequately prepare you for your finals.
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