My GMAT journey from 720 to 770

I scored 720 (Q48/V40) in my first GMAT attempt. I thought I could do better since I had been scoring a lot more in the practice tests, so I decided to retake the test. It turned out to be a very difficult decision, since my workload at work kept on increasing. I could barely manage two hours of study every day, after a 10-odd hours spent in the office. Plus my discipline wasn't that good initially. My preparation for the second attempt began in right earnest only when I finally booked a date for my retake. I studied for about 2.5 months for the first try, and around 1.5 months for the second one.

First attempt: 720 (Q48/V40)

Preparation materials for the first attempt:

1) Kaplan GMAT Primer: I'm not really sure that it's targeted at people who want to score over 700. Plus it does not have too many difficult questions.
2) Manhattan GMAT Sentence Correction: Amazing and quite thorough, I would highly recommend this.
3) Powerscore Critical Reasoning Bible: Very good book again.
4) Tests: Kaplan test series, GMATPrep.

My Kaplan test scores started at 690 for the diagnostic test, and gradually increased from 720 to 800 (just once). I began to think that a 770-type score was achievable.
GMAT Prep: 750,770. I don't think the Kaplan tests are a good approximation of the GMAT, I found quant too easy and verbal unlike the GMAT's verbal.
I was quite confident about my verbal skills and indifferent about quant, since I'm an engineer.

What went wrong

1) I realized later that my time management was quite lacking. I would often run out of time on one of the sections since I found it hard to let go of a question and move on.
2) I paid way to much attention to verbal, and not enough to quant. On the day of the test, I did not do well enough in quant (48), and my verbal let me down (40). In fact, I ran out of time and had to blindly guess for the last 3-4 questions, and apparently all my guesses were wrong.
3) I did not take any breaks between the sections, due to which my mind did not get any rest. I think that was a mistake.

After I got my score, I was really disappointed, since I had tried quite hard and had a difficult time coping with work and the GMAT prep. I really thought I could do better, and I spoke to quite a few people, some of whom suggested I retake and others who told me that 720 was quite enough. Yet I decided I was going to give this another shot.

Second attempt: 770 (Q50,V46)

I drew up a list of my shortcomings, and decided to tackle them one by one.

1) Time management was the biggest problem, I thought. I needed a timer to practice, since I would be using paper tests to practice. I didn't find anything to my liking, so over a weekend I taught myself enough JavaScript to write a web-based timer myself, and uploaded it to the web at the site : https://mkaushik.host56.com

This works on Firefox and Safari only.

Sample inputs, say you want to practice three question sets, from 1 to 20, 5 to 15 and 1-10, in 50 mintues.
Code:
Total time (minutes)  : 50
Comma-separated list  : 1-20,5-15,1-10


Hope it helps you as much as it helped me.
2) Based on a friend's recommendation, I purchased the Manhattan GMAT practice tests. I had heard that the quant was hard, and I wanted to improve my quant score. I found them to be quite good. Again, my scores on these ranged between 720 and 770.
3) For verbal, I used the old gmat paper tests released by mba dot com. I only looked at the verbal, since the quant had an insufficient number of hard questions. I recommend this. My timer (linked above, shameless self plug here) came in handy.
4) For quant, I used all of the links to practice problems that you can find in Bunuel's signature (thanks a ton buddy). Some of them are really hard, but they sharpen your mind. I timed myself while doing them, skipped the hard ones
5) I revised sentence correction and critical reasoning from the books I talked about earlier. For CR, I made short notes of the strategies suggested by the CR Bible and mugged the strategies up for each kind of CR question.
6) I became really serious about my prep only after I booked a test date. I recommend doing this without delay once you have made up your mind about the exam.

Things I realized during and after the exam

1) On the day of the exam, I still took longer than usual on many questions; due to the test anxiety, it was harder to let a question go, guess and move on.
2) However, if I had not moved on, I would have surely fallen short of time on quant; the fact that I guessed the answer of one or two questions that did not make sense to me at all allowed me to catch back up with the time.
3) My strategy for pacing myself was:

I used this for both quant and verbal, for the latter I tried to be ahead of this at all times, since the # of questions is greater after all.

4) On verbal, I moved along at a comfortable pace all throughout.
5) I took every break available. I paced around a little, drank some water, freshened up and took some deep breaths (the last two things not at the same time, obviously). Really helped me relax and reset my mind.

Summary
Sorry for the rambling debrief, very tired after another long day at work.
Make sure you pay attention to time management, dear friends, and don't make the mistakes I made.
Good luck!