I just Beat The GMAT!

I've known for a while that I wanted to go to business school. I was serving in the Peace Corps in a rural town in Africa and told myself that this was the best time to study because once I got home, there would be too much to do and too many distractions. When my mom came to visit me, she brought me a Kaplan GMAT book so that I could start. I put it on my bookshelf and said I'd pick it up when I had time. Turns out that a schedule that kept me working during all daylight hours was not conducive to motivating me to study by candlelight at night. By the time I went to take that book off the shelf, termites had actually eaten the entire inside out and turned it into a castle. I had to burn it...That's how good I am at procrastinating studying. Flash forward 18 months and I am working 80 hours a week between my job and trying to manage some of my old Peace Corps projects towards growth. I carried my books around the country for months saying that I was going to study and never did it. I took two days off from work, sat down with an advanced GMAT verbal book and realized that I was pretty solid on the subject and sat down with a basic GMAT math book and realized it was going to take some serious studying to shake the cobwebs off math that I learned a decade ago. And still I let months pass without doing anything so one day this spring, I decided to book my GMAT and take a practice test. On my first practice, I got a 640-- respectable 90+% for verbal, 40th for math. I decided that if I was going to be serious this time, I needed someone to keep me accountable. I had booked the test for 6 weeks out, knowing that having an impending deadline would also be a big motivating factor.
I travel a lot for work (I rarely spend more than 3 days in one place), am pretty cheap, and wanted to focus exclusively on quant. For these reasons, I stayed away from Manhattan GMAT intensives and in-person / in-classroom tutoring. I did a google search and found Target Test Prep. I liked that they did all of their tutoring via webex / conference call. As a consultant, I am very comfortable with these technologies and it meant that I could have my tutoring sessions from wherever I happened to be on a given day. We met for 1 hour 1x per week. In the interim, I worked all the way through their curriculum. I highly recommend it for people who can analyze what they got wrong on a problem, but need help remembering how to do certain types of math. It's comprehensive, so by test day I knew that even if I wasn't going to get every question right, I would not get a type of question I hadn't seen before. For each chapter, I took a test as a diagnostic and then worked on the specific types of questions within each chapter that I got wrong. It's a very focused plan that I felt most effectively used my time. The website is also mobile friendly, which was a life saver. As I did most of my studying on planes, not having to try to fit my laptop and a notebook on the seatback tray helped minimize frustration. The tutor, Jeff, helped me through particularly challenging questions and areas where I was having difficulty teaching myself. He also was really flexible and responsive via text message at all hours of the day and night.
For practice tests, I used the official GMAT ones (both the free ones and I purchased a pack). I took one Manhattan practice test (the free one) and it was way off. On my second to last practice test, I noticed that the majority of my incorrect questions in verbal were sentence correction, so I read through that chapter of the Manhattan books and on test day, that was my best section. My incorrects in math were evenly distributed so I just kept working through generally.
On test day, I slept in, had a good breakfast, and got to the center early. I did not study. I drank a nice big cup of iced coffee on my way in, but switched to water when I got to the test center. I took both breaks and refueled with water, half a kind bar and half a fruit leather bar at each break to get hydration, protein, and sugar. I treated the essay as a mental warm up since I know it doesn't really count. I took my time, structured my thinking, and double checked my answer. I ended up getting my best score on the actual test by 10 points. I got a 46 in math and a 45 in verbal for a total of 730 (96 percentile). My recommendation overall would be to find someone to keep you motivated a work through problems (a tutor, family member, or friend) and use diagnostics to choose where to study instead of trying to learn it all. It may feel good to practice what you know, but it is a waste of time.
Hope this is helpful for people....

Congratulations!!!

I must say that your Quant is "Not Bad" but Verbal is "Exceptional" (One can see it in the percentiles that you got in Quant and Verbal respectively.


But
Great job done!!!