Dear tsharma,

I'm happy to give my 2 cents on this.

My short answer is: it's never too early to start to pay attention to timing. This take-as-much-time-as-you-need approach is an unsustainable luxury in GMAT prep.

You propose a plan of (a) get comfortable with questions & concepts in a untimed way, and only then (b) impose time limits once you're comfortable. In my view, the problem with that, is that you would need a whole new process of getting comfortable to the time limits, and that process of "getting comfortable" could be as long as or longer than the first "getting comfortable" phase.

I would urge you to force yourself to pick up the pace right now. It's great that you have practiced, for example, writing short reasons for the eliminated answers. It's great to have had that as preparation. Now, you have to make that a mental process, where you just eliminate answers quickly and focus in on the correct answer. Yes, you will bear more frustration and feel more stress at the outset of doing everything timed, but the more you acclimate yourself to it, the less stressful it will be on the real GMAT. Better to spend three months getting use to time limits, not just two or one.

Don't think of "understanding" and "speed"/"pace" as two different things, thinking that first you'll understand, then after that you'll figure out pace. As far as the GMAT is concerned, the two are not really separate. Much of what the GMAT is about, on both math and verbal, is your ability to hone in very quickly on what is critical for getting to the answer and what is superfluous. It's not at all clear to me that spending a great deal of time doing the "think through the question slowly" thing is really going to lay much groundwork for this much more critical set of GMAT skills. It's almost apples and oranges, or at least not as related as one naively would imagine.

If you think about it, going to grad school for a Ph.D. vs. going to B-school for an MBA are two very different things. That "contemplate things slowly and deeply" mode is what you might do in many different Ph.D programs, but the business world is about: see the situation --> discern the opportunity--> act. BAM. The person in the business who stands around contemplating simply misses out --- the time for the deal, the sweet spot, comes and goes, and the contemplator is just left holding the bag.

So, I would say, yes, timing is important from the beginning.

Does this make sense? Please let me know if you have any further questions.

Mike