My GMAT journey.......could be helpful for strategy formation for others....

This is the post I wrote in beat the GMAT........Hope it helps some of my friends for GMAT preparation....

Hi sorin, 
Thanks for extending the invite...... 
Currently I am doing my MBA from IIMA PGPX... 
Below given is my story.... 
From 610 to 720.......has been a journey worth remembering.......employing strategies and methods, changing them, and redeploying them until you arrive at the right one for yourself. 
I will tell the method that worked for me......word of caution is that this strategy may not work for you so take this as a guideline and implement and adapt ur strategy.....After all Adapting is the key to survival....since Darwin..... 
So here it goes...... 
Got a real dip in confidence when I got 610.....could not study and focus for about a month.....but then I refocused myself on what to improve and how to go ahead. 

For Quant:- 
1. Identify your bottleneck(where ur falling short in score) DS/PS, once you have done this 50% of the work is done. 
2. Use about 3 preliminary tests to analyze this, for this u can use the diagnostics in OG and the 2 power prep thats what I did. 
3. My weak area was DS, so I then shifted my focus to DS in Quant....always remember when ur working on DS u also have to use the other skills so they also improve....so improving the problem area leads to improvement in the already strong area. 

How did I focus on DS:- 
1. Every day I used to solve 20 examples of DS in a timebound approach. Maintained an excel giving me the % of correct to track my improvement. 
2. I also maintained an excel detailing the responses that I got wrong...so that I can know where am I faltering. 
3. I also created a label for error i.e error was due to oversight, Fundamental understanding, Fatigue or any other cause. This labeling helped me pin point my reason for problem in DS. 
To my surprise i realized that my Understanding was strong, I just never checked the option upto C whenever i was done with A I used to set a judgement in my mind.....so for me I had to go through a thought process shift. 

How did I focus on Verbal:- 
This is the bone of contention for most.............. 
I adopted a similar strategy....though I needed to improve in all the areas, my weakest was Sentence correction. 
1. Every day I used to solve 20 examples of SC in a timebound approach. Maintained an excel giving me the % of correct to track my improvement. 
2. I also maintained an excel detailing the responses that I got wrong...so that I can know where am I faltering. 
3. I also created a label for error i.e error was due to oversight, Fundamental understanding, Fatigue or any other cause. This labeling helped me pin point my reason for problem in SC. 
To my surprise i realized that my Fundamentals were weak. 
How to improve Fundamentals:- Please read this carefully...... 
U cannot know all the rules in english...you do not want to be William shakespeare.....So u need to focus on the rules asked in the GMAT...... 
How to do this is tricky, get all the OG sets 10,11,12,13 now you have a pretty exhaustive set of Sentence correction. Now when u solve a question you will get a rule, even if you get the answer correct always go ahead and see the understanding, this will help u solve the doubts in the fundamentals. 
Formulate an excel with the rules and the problem of SC written in the row next to it. Later when you want to understand the rules better, read and go through the problems that you have identified.... 
In GMAT you will never face a problem you have faced, so the focus should be on rules and these will get u through. 

For RC:- 
Only option is read I read a lot of novels , magazines, newspaper articles to improve my understanding. 

For CR:- 
I was just good at it, so just practiced from the OG. 
Importance of online forums:- 
I used to regularly browse through them to see the responses of people and understand their reasoning, though i did not post actively on beat the gmat I read a lot of posts daily i spent around 30 mins on this website........ 

Hope this may help people understand my process and helps u improve the score......Hope u all achieve your dreams 
You can write to me for help on mehtamaulikd@gmail.com, and can see my daily blog of MBA journey on http://maulikhelpsu.blogspot.in/ 

TC, hope this helps.......ATB for the test.....