My GMAT preparation

Out of 1000 people who take GMAT, 20 score 750 or above. Out of these 20, atleast 5 are bloggers. Out of these 5 atleast 2 feel happy about this and want to share their experience with the world. So this is no rocket science that there are umpteenth blogs out there giving excellent advise on how to go about preparing for the GMAT. First of all you must understand that different people have different study habits and different degree of grasping powers. Kindly DO NOT alter your study habits or try replicating someone else's schedule just because the latter could do good on the G-Day. I have reasons to believe that anyone can score 740+ in GMAT without doing anything creative.

Having said that, I am sharing my study plan.

Modus Operandi
I have a very demanding job and an extremely pesky boss so I understood that I can not manage more than 3-4 hours a day. My office timings are 11am-8pm but I seldom reach home before 10. I set aside 11pm-1am and 9am-10:30am everyday for GMAT preparation. I would ideally give 6-7 hours on weekends and took a test almost every weekend after 3 weeks of preparation. I stuck to this schedule like a leach. In retrospect, I am amazed at my discipline. I had never been so sincere all my life .

Verbal
My first diagnostic test revealed that I need special attention on SC and CR. For SC I started with Manhattan SC Guide (Its indispensable) and finished it in a week. I followed it up with OG11 SC and finished it too. Please note that It's very important to keep referring Manhattan SC guide from time to time. I think this much practice brought my SC level to 70% accuracy and I was ready for the SC1000 document. The best way to gain from SC1000 is to revisit the questions you got wrong or got correct by fluke. Copy the first 5 words of the question and search it on google. Almost all possible questions have been discussed on either testmagic.com or manhattangmat.com forums. These 2 websites contain a wealth of information and you should exploit them.
For CR I started with the OG11 and backed it up by CR1000 series. I tried some LSAT tests too but I do not recommend them.
So by 3 weeks using "brute force" I more or less overpowered my fears and began to enjoy CR and SC.

In a nutshell The books I relied on were : OG11, Manhattan SC, 1000 series (Helped me a lot) and Spidey's grammar notes. I referred Kaplan800 too but did not finish it. Also try to get your hands on gmat sets 21-30. They have excellent questions.

Quant
Being an engineer my quant skills are pretty decent. However, my DS was a tad problematic and my speed a bit slow. Realizing that this may spell doom I also practiced quant enough. Kindly try to download the document from Beat The GMAT Forum. They have good material and give a good practice. Also the quant questions in Manhattangmat tests are a great practice but please understand that those questions are way above the GMAT standard and prepare you for the worst.
I prepared for quant mostly from mock GMATs. I took some 16 tests in the span of 3 months and I think they gave a good exposure.

So, as you can see my preparation method was far from being methodical. It was more of understanding my weaknesses and clobbering them using brute force (read..practice). It worked for me but that in no way guarantees similar result for another subject.
My advise would be to cut out a strategy at the very outset and stick to it militantly. In the end performance in GMAT is directly proportional to your labor and your mental toughness.

Best of luck to all.