Yo! I sat the exam yesterday (26 April, online) and just received my results. I'm very grateful to this community! I spent quite some time here in the beginning of the process to get a feel for what has worked and not worked for people. I'd recommend you do the same, but then leave it to focus on actually studying.
PREPARATION
I started in early January and decided to study at a pretty slow pace to a) not wear out while working full time, and b) actually make it stick. In practice, that meant I did 30 minutes here, 2 hours there, but never crunched away for long hours. Rather, I focused on consistency, doing something every other day.
My preparation can be broken into three phases:
Phase 1 - 35-hour course
I first watched AR's 35-hour Udemy course on 1.5-2.0x speed. Overall a good intro, but I would recommend doing some research first and watch some youtube videos from other providers (e.g. DM) before choosing which 35-hour course to do.
Phase 2 - Mindset and deep-dive
In February, I moved on to Mohammed Rahman's videos on the 23 mindset principles and exam tips. I feel like this was key to my exam success. I preferred MR's way of explaining and exemplifying the principles over AR's 50 principles video.
I watched some other videos already recommended here a zillion times, including DM (Agile / PMP Cheat Sheet / PMP Fast Track / Scrum), AR (200 hard questions, watched around half of them), Ricardo Vargas (PMBOK 6th Edition Guide).
I spent exactly zero minutes reviewing the PMBOK guide or the Agile practice guide. I bought the Third3Rock Notes but never reviewed them.
Phase 3 - Study Hall Baby
In early March, I purchased Study Hall Plus. As everyone will say, this is probably a must, and I agree with that. Over the course of around 6 weeks, I did the 20 minis, the 166 practice questions, and finally the first three mocks. Results:
Minis: 72%
Practice questions: 72%
Mock 1: 78%
Mock 2: 82%
Mock 3: 78%
After each mini/practice set/mock, I immediately reviewed the questions I got wrong, and took a screenshot of those questions along with their explanation, which I pasted into a word file. More on that in a minute.
Having read that 70% or so likely means you're in the safe zone, I skipped the final two mocks and instead scheduled my exam seven days later.
In the final week, I uploaded the mentioned word file with screenshots to Claude and prompted it to create a tool including flashcards and a quiz function to practice the incorrect answers again. This helped a lot and wasn't very time-consuming - recommend!
EXAM DAY
I took my exam from home. The proctor didn't bug me, apart from instructing me in the beginning to remove my watch or (s)he would fail me. I removed it :)
The exam ran from 12:15 to 16:15 which was a good time for me. I had a good night's sleep, woke up and immediately took a 30-minute walk in the morning sunshine to wake up properly. I ate a massive breakfast, reviewed some mindset principles and some expert question notes I had taken in the week prior.
I used the two 10-minute breaks in full. I ate some rice and drank some coffee and orange juice in the breaks, to get a solid/weird mix of slow/fast carbs and caffeine. I wore the only blue garment I own.
The exam was somewhat harder than the mocks, but following MR's exam strategy (frame the problem -> eliminate answers that violate the mindset principles -> choose the answer that best addresses the framed problem) helped, a strategy I had practiced across almost 1000 Study Hall questions.
Got my results around 24 hours after finishing the exam.
A FEW FINAL REMARKS
Having thought about sitting the exam for a year of so, I decided to do it this spring when I learnt the exam content outline is due to change come July. I didn't track time but probably spent something like 80-100 hours preparing for this, which would equate to a bit less than an hour a day on average. The time is the real cost you need to consider before starting your journey, aside from the 600 dollars or so you'll spend on Study Hall and the membership+exam.
Challenging experience but happy I did it, and if I can do it, so can you!
Happy to try to answer any questions.
Cheers!