A thing about GMAT

I've been advising a few people about how to prepare for GMAT and lately, there have been a few more asking the same questions - How to tackle GMAT? How to get a score above 700? How should I start my preparation? What should I focus on first, Quant or Verbal etc etc.
The questions range from too generic to too specific. I thought may be a few others too could get my gyan on GMAT, if it sounds convincing enough !

My answer to all the questions begins with - know the GMAT, know yourself and have a strategy.
I believe that rather than preparing for GMAT (unless you're an awesome test taker and score at least a 700 in your first mock test , unprepared !), it's always better to learn how to prepare for GMAT. It's more of unlearning what you think you know and actually learn and know what's exactly in it. Know more about the areas GMAT tests you in. Quant and Verbal are too broad too classify for the not-so good of us.

Next, knowing your weaknesses and strengths in all aspects of the GMAT lets you prepare better. For example, if you're an Indian from a good engineering school, you're already pretty good at math to score at least a 49 in GMAT Quant but Verbal section may be a big weakness. But if you consider Verbal as a whole, it is sure to give you goosebumps. So learn what you are good at. May be you're good at grammar (SC) but not at reasoning(CR) or you're good at reading (RC) but not at grammar(SC). It helps to know your pain-points so that you can tackle them more aggessively and tread more cautiously.
Let's take my case as an example. I was good at math and never faced a question that I couldn't answer given the generous time in GMAT, but I did it too fast, fast enough to ignore those finer details in Data Sufficiency and used to make atleat 5-6 mistakes in DS not that I didn't know how to but because I wasn't patient enough. So, I made it a point to go slow at the DS questions and double-check that I was right. It helped..it helped to the fact that I got a 50 in Quant away from the 47-48 I used to get earlier.

But again, it's always better to stress on the specifics - like if you're doing a mistake only in say, idiom-related questions in SC, it doesn't make sense to go through all of SC again and again and not focusing on the issue at hand. So get to the specifics and note them down

So know your weaknesses but how do you tackle them?
That's where planning and strategy comes in. Having a strategy doesn't mean how many hours a day, or how much study material you covered. It's about how you're doing to overcome your specific weakness - what are the steps you need to take to actually overcome them. For example, I knew that inference questions in RC was a weak point of mine, which ask us for an answer based on an excerpt in the essay. So I made of note like this - "Process of Elimination may not work for Inference Qs. Don’t just read the paragraph again from where the inference is drawn from. Read all information related to that subject (might be in different paragraphs and with different names) make points and check with answers." or something like this in CR - "Correct Answers do not deviate from conclusion - Eliminate anything that deviates from conclusion. This made it easier for me to tackle the specifics and not beat around the bush wondering why Iam not good at RC or CR.

So, follow these,make note of your progress, and you won't need to add a mystifying aura to GMAT :) Hope this long long post helps !