How to improve verbal to 40+?

What was your real exam experience in terms of Q difficulty?

I had practiced and studied from many resources but now i am only using Q's from Official resources such as OG12/13, QR/VR 1 and 2, and QP1 to formalize my D-Day Game Plan . People say that the real exam Q's are tougher than the official resources.
Am i making a mistake or its completely ok to do so?

I tried few of the tough problems (as per my error log) from VR 2 and OG12 again.
In CR and RC, I found that without taking abbreviated notes, i can not solve the Q's with confidence. The good part of the story is that with abbreviated notes my accuracy is close to 100%. It is so ironic is that i resisted taking notes until recently
But the bad part of the story is that i am taking around ~ 2 minutes (plus minus 15 seconds) to solve a CR Q.

In case of RC, the reading timing is ~4 minutes with 30 seconds plus minus variation. But after that i take ~1 minute 15 seconds with 15 second plus minus variation and with close to 100% accuracy. This timing data is for hard problems from QP1, OG12/13 etc.

I am kind of planning to take notes and will try the same in my test this weekend.
Is it a good idea to rely on notes? Is it practical possible in real exam to take notes in CR and RC?

I would love to use Bunnel's strategy mentioned at:

study-plan-for-verbal-gmat-98342.html

But mentioned SC timing is beyond my capabilities for sure

My SC time is around ~100+ seconds. I am yet to get the final data for accuracy in SC as its varying from 60-70% in hard problems and around 90% in easy and medium problems.

I am scoring in 48ish range in Quant and my target score is 710-720.