Structured Practice

George Leonard, in his book Mastery, uses Aikido to introduce the concept of deliberate practice. Deliberate practice requires one to break down training into specific skills that need to be improved. One then deliberately, i.e. intentionally, practices each skill, in isolation, repeatedly, over a long time.

That often means practicing over a lifetime.

What is Deliberate Practice?

Leonard's ideas of mastery consist of:

• focus on specific areas for improvement, rather than just repeating a task,
• get guidance from a coach or mentor, or ask a more experienced learner for feedback, and
• avoid instant gratification, enjoy the journey.

Another example of this practice is professional baseball players hitting specific pitches over and over and over again in a batting cage — each time, focusing only on this one fundamental skill.

This idea of deliberate practice has been important in my chess training. I am drawn, probably like many of you, to structure. Deliberate practice provides this.

The alternative for many may be a more chaotic, laissez-faire approach to training that might center around an abundance of blitz games, reviewing some of those here and there, and picking up a book or course to browse on a topic of ephemeral interest. This is a pattern I could easily fall into if I don't provide myself structure.

How I Structure Deliberate Practice

My structure is built on a Google Spreadsheet. It has 10 tabs. The most important tabs are a Dashboard that shows a historical chart of all rated OTB tournaments, a Log that displays activity by activity all my serious chess games and training activities as I complete them, and most importantly, a Frequency tab, that breaks down each chess activity by week, displaying side by side the weekly activity goals and how much I've completed so far for each goal.

Ok, yes, it is a bit intense for a hobby. But, what can I say?

Here is what my Frequency tab currently looks like:

In the above, you'll see the activities I commit to doing every week — those are the ones above the horizontal green divider (#3-9), such as solve tactics problems, read a chess book page, etc. Then it lists the goal for the week, e.g. 70 tactics. Then to the right of the goals are my weekly process performances — how well I performed the training process I've committed to each week.  You'll see green boxes, which mean I met or surpassed a goal, yellow boxes which mean I made a good effort, and red boxes which means I was a bit of a failure in that activity.

Of course, I want to see a column of green at the end of each week.

You can see that rarely happens. One reason is I don't always have access to slow games. Mostly, though, life gets in the way. Something I'm sure sounds familiar.

My Kind of Fun — Gamification

But, this spreadsheet, which I've been tracking since July 2013, makes chess study fun. Yes, chess is already fun — that's why I play and study.

Let's admit it, though. Sometimes we don't want to do tactics. We don't want to sit and calculate a difficult position for 20, 30, or even 60 minutes. We don't want to eat our broccoli.

Gamification is the application of game design techniques to other aspects of one's life (for a relevant review see Hamari et al. 2014). For instance, the ubiquitous "like" button in social media is the gamification of online discussions. Duolingo uses extensive gamification to help users learn languages.

I have a good amount of internal motivation to study and play chess. But, sometimes when I'm tired or busy or stressed, well, chess may fall off my RADAR. This is where gamification comes in handy.

Gamification can add extrinsic motivation when our internal motivation fails us. And it will at times. We're human. But, each week when I see my red boxes slowly turning to yellow and then to green as I complete activities, it makes me happy. I get just enough dopamine to want to keep coming back to my training spreadsheet to log activities.

Green boxes are my gold star stickers for a job well done.