So how to improve in chess

So hopefully you are part of an 'informal' learning system here such as the "AWW-RATS" player group AND active in a FORMAL group here as well.

Please use the tactics trainer, but unlike others; i say your mission should you choose to accept it is NOT to do 3 thousand tactics puzzles. YOUR JOB is to get them right, to understand them and replay them if you miss the correct answer. It is wasteful of your life to spend time in chess without thinking the best 'bang-4-your-time-buck' try and make your chess useful and fun.

Do not mindlessly play games in stanard time. If you want to just chill out and mess around then play blitz games. This is about instinctive/reactive moves instead of careful planning.

Do you feel the need to "get-away" from chess? a common symptom of this is looking in a mirror and your eyes have black and white squares 'burned' onto them...

If your looking for something else to do play checkers, this was a soviet union chess learning technigue to give the players a break from chess but get them to learn to look at the big picture of the board. Since this playing checkers is part of the system that produced ten of the top dozen players in the world in the 1960's it should help you too...

And if you are ready to jump off your stack of chess books to "end-it-all", then do something completely different. Do something completely different. Do something like Dungeons or Dragons, or Angry-Birds; anything tht is imaginative. Anything reasonable that involves memory and imagination will give you a complete break from chess and when you 'come-back' to chess you should find those new brain skills of creativity will help you...