Know that I think of it, can anyone whose been through the process answer this question: Did carefully construction your application and planning alleviate some of the inherent mystery/stress/blindness of the process?
You've gotten some good replies already, and I'm not exactly finished with the process, but I can still provide some input... I would consider myself quite neurotic (in a friendly way, not a gunnerish way!), and many of my professors have referred to me as having a type AAA personality. I love planning and scheduling and organizing. Being careful and thoughtful and organized and prepared for the application cycle helped IMMENSELY. Here is what I did:
- Prewrote my work and activities section essays
- Calculated all of the hours I spent and recorded start and end times
- Emailed all of my activity contacts and asked if they agreed with the number of hours I was putting down, in case any of my schools called them or anything
- Selected my schools and researched them fairly thoroughly
- Prewrote my PS
- Prewrote my secondaries and created separate documents for each school
- Got my letters of rec into Interfolio by May 15th
- Made spreadsheets with important school information
- Made a Master Plan document where I listed all of the things I had to get done and secondaries I needed to write/submit, and crossed each item off as I completed it
- Started an MDApps, which I have kept updated on a very regular basis
And I am beyond, beyond, beyond glad that I did all of those things.
For example, with secondaries? I would get 1-5 secondaries on a given day, and knowing that I already had a Word document with my essays carefully crafted and edited ready to go was amazing. I just filled out the name, birthday, etc. section on each one, plopped in my pre-written essays, and submitted without any additional stressing involved. Sure, the writing period in May and June was a bit tedious, but having all of that extra time to prepare was really great. I got good feedback, was able to take my time, and ended up happy without a rushed final product.
Sure, this cycle has still been stressful and anxiety-provoking. But I never had to scramble, I didn't lose track of any essays or secondaries, I didn't miss any deadlines (in fact, I submitted every single secondary within 24 hours except for one which took me closer to 72 hours)... And that has really made me feel more in control of what can sometimes feel like a blind rollercoaster. Any semblance of order you can make is helpful, or at least it was to me.
Good luck
Around this time last year was when I started writing my PS and crafting my school list. Although I ended up completely rewriting my PS, redoing my school list, and even rewriting all of my activity descriptions... I'm glad I put in effort ahead of time so that I knew what I was doing upon revisions instead of writing everything only once and being unhappy but being forced to submit it because I had no more time. Hope that helps a little!
Edit: I should add that a lot of people do not put in nearly this amount of planning and they end up doing just fine or better than me. This is just how I preferred to do things, because it made me feel less helpless in the whirlwind of the application process