GMAT Prep Update and RC frustrations

Its been a while since I posted here, but really feel the need to vent my frustrations a bit - and what better place than my blog!

Over the past month, I've been studying for the GMAT off n' on (more on than off) and mostly gotten all the Math fundas down. I also did enough problems of each section to know where my largest weakness is: as expected it is Reading Comprehension.

While I felt that most of the mistakes I make in most of the sections were careless errors, the Reading Comprehension mistakes were simply due to stress and not "getting it". It takes me about 8 minutes to completely read a passage and another 3-4 minutes to answer 4-5 questions on that passage.

Most books/sites suggest making notes (1-2 sentences) of each paragraph and then referring to those notes. My problem is, I end up spending almost 7-8 minutes reading and making these notes (which I do not even bother to refer back to!). Whenever I try to speed up my reading, I end up not getting the questions right.

I spent a good part of today getting extremely frustrated since I could not figure out a way to tackle the RC. I think what I'm going to try to follow is to only write the main topic in the first paragraph and unless there is a new topic / idea introduced stop making notes and just read through the whole thing. Also, I'll try to read the first question so I know what to look for while going through the paragraph and it may force and entice me to read more actively.

My goal is to bring my average time for reading a passage to 4-4.5 minutes, and being able to read it comfortably so as to not make mistakes.