GMAT Debrief - 610(Q49 V24) to 710(Q49 V38)

My year-long GMAT journey has been one with many mistakes.
I hope the learnings in this debrief could avoid people making the same mistakes I made and get their target at the first attempt.

I prepared for the GMAT as a working professional with long travelling hours and late working hours.

When I began, I did not have any concrete strategy for the GMAT. My understanding was that solving 2000+ questions would do the needful.
I bought the OG, Manhattan books, Powerscore CR bible, Aristotle SC prep and also got a subscription of e-gmat.
I felt solving everything from these resources would do the trick.

I was already strong at Quants so realised that not much effort was required. I hardly practised Quants. I just went through a bit of data sufficiency problems.
For verbal, I began reading up on techniques to solve questions. I read techniques from too many resources and used e-gmat mostly for their scholaranium and a few concepts.
Following the 3-step technique of e-gmat seemed to take long to solve questions so I left it halfway. RC was extremely weak.
Because of certain reasons, I could not postpone the date of the exam and gave the exam confused, with poor basics and reading speed.
I ended up with 610(Q49 V24)

I was not disheartened because I still had a lot of time for my applications.
I took a 3-week leave after 7 months and decided to give my best shot at GMAT.
This time it was different. I only used the OG and e-gmat. This time my strategy was to master SC and CR. I thought that keeping RC as a weak area could be compensated.
The e-gmat 3-step strategy built a strong foundation for my SC and CR. Another thing that helped me was I used to write down why every other option was incorrect and match it to the reason given by e-gmat. This strategy helped me learn more by solving fewer questions.
I made 2 big mistakes.

1. The strategy this time was to mark C for a long RC passage and use the gained time to solve the SC and CR questions properly.
2. I used to pause the timer in the mocks, take a picture and solve the question when I was behind time, hoping that during the exam, the exam pressure would allow me to solve questions faster.

Even though I scored 700+ in my mocks I ended up with a 640(Q49 V29). Probably all my C's on the long RC passage was incorrect. Also, I still did not have time for the last 2 questions.

I was heartbroken this time as I did not have much time for my applications nor any more leaves left. So taking another attempt seemed to be difficult.
I thought I can compensate for the low GMAT score with my SOP and LOR's.

But the thought of applying with a low GMAT score kept bothering me.
I took 1-month break to get settled with my work and recover my sanity. After that I decided to give one last attempt to the GMAT along with working with my applications parallelly. I went through the RC course of e-gmat and used all the strategies such as immersion, prethinking , predictive thinking and reading fast through dense details.
Parellaly my reading speed was improving because of the research I was doing for my applications.

I decided to do 3 RC's/ day from the OG using the e-GMAT strategy. Further, I revisited my error logs for SC and CR and brushed up the concepts from the notes I had made.

Finally, I scored a 710 (Q49 V38). I had time to give just one mock. If I could give 2-3 more I was pretty sure I could 20-30 points more.
But If's are always wishes and cannot be proven until achieved. After the exam, I was still satisfied with the score.

To summarize all my learnings.

1. Pre thinking is the most crucial part of CR and RC.
2. Focusing on the meaning side of SC is extremely important. Also reading the entire sentence looking for errors works.
3. Mocks are important so that you don't loose focus in the final minutes of the section. Also Mocks should be treated exactly as a the Exam-centre experience.
4. Reading from quality resources such as The Economist helps.
5. Leaving an entire RC could be extremely risky.
6. Do not use too many resources, instead learn as much as possible from fewer questions.

Cheers all. Hope this helps someone with a similar thought process and skillset as mine.

I also want to thank all members of the GMATclub whose solutions to OG questions have been extremely helpful.
Advise and motivation was always available on this forum.