Need help with quant timing strategy to attempt first 10 qs

There's long been some bad advice floating around GMAT prep circles about the importance of spending time on the first ten questions. What matters is not where a question appears in the test - what matters is how hard or easy the question is. You don't want mistakes on easier questions, because those hurt you a lot. Mistakes on hard questions don't hurt you much - in fact, if you're aiming for a Q47, you're not supposed to get your Q50-level questions right (if you could do that, you'd be a Q50 level test taker!). In fact, if you are encountering questions that are so hard you need to guess at them, you should take that as a good sign, not a bad sign - it usually means you've done well on all the easy and medium questions, and the test thinks you're a very high level test taker.

The only reason the early questions can be more important is that the earliest questions are more likely to be easy than later ones, if you're an above-average test taker. But the test can actually start at quite a hard level sometimes, and if you do well on the first couple of questions, you can get to hard questions quickly. When deciding whether to invest time in a question, you should not be basing that decision on where you are in the test. You should base that decision on whether investing further time will lead you to a good answer. So no matter where you are in the test, about a minute into each question you should be asking "if I spend more time on this, will I get an answer?". If so, spend the time, even if it's going to take three or three and a half minutes. But if you don't see a path to a solution, nor a useful fallback strategy (e.g. estimation to rule out bad answers), take a guess and move on -- if you can't solve the problem, it's almost certainly a hard problem, and you're not hurting yourself much by guessing. You'd be hurting yourself more by consuming a further 2+ minutes, since that will obligate you to guess at a random question somewhere else, a question you could probably answer.

So this is what I'd suggest: take a realistic diagnostic test (only GMATPrep is realistic) where you use a new pacing strategy. Forget about "the first ten questions" and instead invest time where time will be useful, and save time where spending time will not obviously be useful. Be sure to be disciplined about making those decisions - it's easy to get stubborn about questions, since most GMAT questions look solvable at first glance. If you do that on a realistic diagnostic test, your score will tell you if this pacing strategy is better or worse than the strategy you've been using until now.

Good luck!