My GMAT Study Strategy

After reviewing a lot of success stories and based on what I feel like I will need to work on, I've formulated the following strategy to ace the GMAT:

Books

I plan to use the following books for preparation:

• Kaplan Premier
• Official Guide (Orange book)
• Quantitative and Verbal Official guides
• Kaplan 800
  
• Barrons
  
• Manhattan Sentence Correction
  

Study plan

1) Diagnostic and Strategy

• For each section, make notes on the strategy outlined in the books.
  
• Then complete the relevant section in the Kaplan book.
  
• Complete all sections this way.
  

2) At this stage, I should have a clear idea of which section I need more work on and also have a good idea of strategies to solve problems from each section. This should remove the stress of having to tackle unknown sections later.

3) OG and Kaplan 800: Starting from the toughest section, do all the problems in these books.

When working on any section, each day, do at least 5-10 problems of a previously completed section as well. For example, if I'm done Problem Solving and then am working on Critical reasoning, do 5-10 problems of problem solving everyday along with the Critical Reasoning questions.

4) After OG and Kaplan 800, if required do more problems from Manhattan books.

5) Redo all incorrect/hard/unsure questions again - until I get 100% right. Do this every 2 weeks.

6) Notes and other info:

• While solving problems, make elaborate recordings of answers in the excel sheet to ensure that the hard, tricky, incorrect and confusing questions can be redone.
• Each problem solving session is to have ~40 questions, timed. Use excel to record answers.
• Once the above books are done, redo only the questions that were hard, tricky, got wrong or took a lot of time to finish.
• Get familiar with AWA on weekends.
• Study for 2 hours on weekdays and 5 ours on each weekend day.
  

Excel sheet format

Columns:

• Question #
• Time
• Answer (Actual)
• Attempt 1
• Answer (Selected)
• Right/Wrong
• Slow
• Unsure
• Careless Error
• Conceptual Error
• Note

• Attempt 2
• Answer (Selected)
• Right/Wrong
• Slow
• Unsure
• Careless Error
• Conceptual Error
• Notes