Ok, I realise this is a personal problem, but there may be other RtKers that are considering something similar. I have been very cautious about learning new kanji and so it has taken me the guts of a year to learn up to kanji 1026. The benefit was that whenever I slacked off, even for a month or so, I could come back and I would still remember 90% of the kanji I learned. I did this by always reviewing and rarely venturing forward. I am getting really tired of the slow progress, and I have to know about 600 kanji for college exams in a months time. I am thinking of foregoing all study of any kind other than RtK and getting the whole damn thing finished before the exams, trusting that once I get to the end I will still remember all I have learned and hoping I will have time to learn the readings and various kanji compounds of the 600 kanji I will have to know. It should be easier to do that once I can understand the writing and meaning of the characters. But the only way to make sure I know the 600 kanji I need for the exam is to learn all 2042 of Heisig's (as the college textbook lists the kanji in a completely different order). What should I do? Can it be done, or will I just be shooting my self in the foot and flunk out of college for trying? I really appreciate any advice!

Look those 600 kanji up in RTK, figure out which primitives you need besides the ones you already know (at halfway through the book you shouldnt have too many). You should be able to learn everything you need without having to do all 1000 you have left. If you work hard, use good stories, and grade yourself tough on the SRS, you will remember 80-95%. Go ahead and put one reading on the card for each of the kanji you need, but put it on the front with the keyword and just read it. This will start putting it in your head and make it a little easier for your next step. Also, it wasn't clear, but are all these 600 kanji you need kanji that you haven't done yet because that seems unlikely. So, you might only need to learn 200-300 more kanji plus a few extra primitives. Work smart, and you wont have to work so hard.

Few months are more than enough time to study the rest of RTK and still be able to study whatever other information you may need (kon- and on- yomi, most likely).
It all comes down to how much time you are willing to invest in completing the whole thing. If you have 2-3 hours per day, you can finish the entire book in less than a month if you are persistent with your studies.
On the other hand, if you would rather just learn what you need, you may have more success in doing RTK lite which is twice as small as RTK proper. Most of your kanji will likely be in that group anyway (lite contains the most commonly used ones), and if you didn't cover any characters, you can always go back and use the primitives you already know on them.
Mind you, in the long run, RTK lite isn't as efficient as RTK proper. Characters that share a primitive are much easier to learn together, than they are to learn separately.

The other alternative is to drop RTK order completely. You can always jump around and add kanji in any order you desire. You will have to learn several primitives in isolation which makes learning more time consuming, but it will give you more time to focus on the other parts of the exam later on.

Finally, keep in mind that the goal of RTK is not to prepare you for exams. You will not have perfect recognition of characters bellow steps 6-7, regardless of how diligently you study.
And even then, you will occupationally meet characters that you can't easily recognize or you have to unfold the entire story.
It's sometimes wiser to drop the entire "long-term" process and just cram your way through the exam. Better to pass an exam with temporary knowledge than score a poor mark because the entire grading system is fundamentally broken.

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Yeah if you're doing exams then I would do like kendo99 suggests. On the other hand, sifting through your list of 600 kanji to exclude the other 400 and figure out the "primitive" dependencies is probably a huge waste of time. You may just as well do 10 to 20 a day, which is reasonable. If you can do just 10 a day you should be done in two months, and at that rate you can have some more free time for the rest (though myself I found 10 a day was difficult enough, since I spent a while to visualize stories, up to 1h30 per session, up to 10 minutes on a character sometimes).

Thanks guys, you're right, there is bound to be loads of those 600 I already know. Given the law of averages, since RtK covers the Jouyou kanji and all of the 600 I have to know are from the Jouyou list, then I probably know about half of the 600. The problem for me is just memorising ones with primitives I haven't encountered yet. Remembering the most basic primitives is hard enough as it is, given that they are the parts that you have to learn by brute memory. It usually takes me awhile to assimilate these, and I remember kanji better if they use only very common primitives that I have had time to properly learn by having to use them so much. I'm afraid I'd just forget alot of the kanji if I hadn't learned the primitives well enough. It's probably worth making a list of just the new primitives I have to learn and drilling it. Thanks for the advice and I'm welcome to anymore.

What I would do, get a list of the 600 that you need to know. Finish all of RTK. When you review kanji, and you fail one, check if its one that you need to know. If you DON'T need to know it, then just leave it as a failed card for now. After a few reviews, you will have a big pile of kanji that you don't need to worry about, and you can review them later on when you have time.

Ok, so I'm on #1124 now. I've never tried going this quickly before and frankly it's scaring me a little :-0. I'm really glad to be getting through them so quickly, on the other hand I am just itching to go back and consolidate what I've learned. Old habits die hard. I don't really feel like the newly learnt kanji are "mine". My grip on them just feels a little too tenuous. It's like trying to build a bridge really quickly. Instead of going back and strengthening the foundations and building supports I'm just just trying to build so fast that I reach the other side before it collapses.

The SRS wont let the bridge collapse on you...it is busy strengthening those foundations while you are doing the work of continuing construction (to really extend an already overextended metaphor, pun intended lol)

When is your exam? It's going to make a huge difference in terms of study time/method if it's one month or 3 months ahead.

It's only about a month and a half away. I've decided to go for the 2042 RtK kanji in as short a time as I can manage. I am currently on #1160 with a plan of doing 30 a day and trying to review for about two full hours a day. Hopefully when I get to the end I will have time to learn the readings. I also have to learn 3 kanji compounds for every one of the 600 kanji. I looked up the KanjiTown method of doing the readings, and it looks really good, but I don't know if I'd have time to use this method for the exam.
I'll just try and drill the compounds once I've finished RtK.

You could also look into the Movie Method and see if you like that too. Or kanji chaining.