The Funky Math of Just Getting Started

One thing I try to adhere to in my chess study is consistency of effort, working a little bit every day at whatever I'm studying for the week. I call this a "grazing" approach. The alternative, doing larger, "cram-like" study sessions with longer periods of no work in between I call "fast-and-binge." Pedagogical experience has long shown that a grazing approach to studying is more effective than a fast-and-binge approach. Apart from whatever cognitive benefits it may have, I think one of the biggest benefits of a grazing approach lies in the way it encourages motivation. 

Let's say, as an adult improver, I determine that I have seven hours per week to devote to chess study. I could do one hour per day, seven days a week. I could also decide to do nothing during the work week, but do three-and-a-half hours each day on Saturday and Sunday (or even—good heavens!—seven hours in one day). But I know what's going to happen. Some chore will pop up on the weekend that prevents me from putting in a full three-and-a-half hour session. Or I'll be so tired from working all week, that I'll look at that massive three-and-a-half-hour session like an unclimbable mountain and just say "Ugh, I'm too tired for that. I'll just skip today." So in addition to its cognitive deficiencies, I think fast-and-binge is poor from a motivational perspective. 

I suspect lack of motivation to just sit down and do the work is one of several factors that impede adult improvement. Sure, there is cognitive decline, especially for folks like me in the fifty-plus crowd. There's no denying that. But, as a foreign language teacher (like chess, a skill-based discipline where the young learn far faster than us codgers), I've seen tons of older students enroll in my classes over the years. Some do quite well, so the cognitive decline, while it's certainly there, isn't hitting them as hard as you might think. If they find or make the time to do the work, they do okay or better. For those who do poorly, many simply drop out of the class, explaining to me that they couldn't find time to do the assignments. Others stay in the class and get a bad grade because they ended up not turning in half the work—you're not going to get an A in the class if you're completing only 50% of the assignments.

In my chess study, making sure I do the work is something I've become fanatical about. It's why I draft a weekly study plan, and why I post that training plan every week on this blog. It's why I adopt a grazing approach to my study. And to ensure I do the daily work, I've also adopted the principle of a reasonable target time minimum for each day. I set my minimum target time at a mere thirty minutes per day. 

Thirty minutes is not a long study session. I know, no matter how long my day was or how tired I may be, that I can do thirty minutes. In fact, I can do thirty minutes standing on my head. And the thing is, those thirty minutes are only a target minimum. In practice, once I sit down and start going, I rarely actually stop after thirty minutes. Sure, some days I'm just so tired that it's thirty and done. But most days, it stretches out a bit longer. 

Case in point (and the inspiration for this post): Friday evening, after a long, hard week, I really did not feel like studying. After dinner—my usual study time—I played a few rapid games online instead. Then I watched some TV with my wife. Did some chores. Played with the cats. The next thing I knew, my wife was brushing her teeth and heading off to bed. I stayed up to do a few last chores in the kitchen. All I wanted to do afterward was go to sleep. But I thought about my weekly training plan and how I would not be checking off the Friday box. The thought of the empty box was more than I could bear. I sighed, made a cup of decaf, and headed up to my study to continue analyzing a game of mine I'd been working through all week. "Just thirty minutes," I thought. Ninety minutes later I'd done a pile more analysis than I had expected to, and I proudly put a big ol' check mark in the Friday box of my weekly training plan before shutting down the computer and heading off to bed. 

And that's how thirty minutes per day ends up coming out to seven or eight hours per week. Call it "the funky math of just getting started."

This morning (Saturday), I finished the analysis I'd been working on all week: 

And here is my training plan for the week—with all the boxes checked off.

Lastly, just under two weeks to go until Kings Island! Here's how the month-long plan is looking: