Hey all,

Kaden asked that I share with you about how I made a blog with my chess goals for 2024.

However, one of my goals is to be more efficient with my time LOL, so with that being said, I'm going to write this post in 10 mins and no more.

How to make S.M.A.R.T chess goals.

S: Set a SPECIFIC goal or goals in mind. They need to be measurable. "I want my rating to go up" should be replaced with "I'd like to improve my puzzle rating by 230 points by March 31st 2024" (and yes you're rating will improve eventually).

M: MEASURABLE (That's pretty much covered in the paragraph above)

A: ATTAINABLE. Make your goal lofty but doable, not sure what is reasonable? That's fine, undershoot it and you can always raise the goal.

R: RELEVANT If your goal in the back of your mind is to improve your rating, pick a specific area of your game that you know needs work, and just work on that goal specifically. I chose endgame puzzles because I can measure how many I do, and I have some apps that give me a puzzle rating in the different categories. OR maybe your goal is to study a specific book for _____ mins per day.. it will be harder to measure progress, but you can measure the time it took you, and you can write down/record key concepts you learned that day.

T: Time Based and TESTABLE! Set your goal for whatever timeframe you want, but at certain points, test yourself to see if you can measure or provide some proof of progress.

Example: I'm going to do 5 endgame puzzles per day, 15 mins of endgame book study, and 5-10 mins per day of endgame speed training from the learning app on chess dot com. I'll measure my success by: My puzzle score improvement, my book study concepts I can document or utilize in my games, and my amount of time to solve the endgame learning game tool (i.e. took be 6:00 minutes to finish the 5 challenges).

If you really want to look at my blog, i'm sure you can find it on my page, but it was mainly made for me so it's very wordy and probably only meaningful for me.

Hope this helps and I hope your chess rises to it's highest levels for you in 2024!

Albany Oregon Chess Club

Super Admins

Coordinators