Study Plan?

Quick question.  I've recently become fairly serious about improving my game, but I'm heading back to school soon.  With classes and work and whatnot, I'll only have an hour or so each day to spend on chess.  My question is this: how would that hour be most profitably spent?

Right now, my plan is to spend 30 minutes on tactics (Predator at the Chessboard, Chesstempo, TT) and 30 minutes either studying something else (strategy, the opening, endgames, masters' games) or playing live games here.  The reason for the emphasis on tactics is that I've read here that that's how novices like me improve the most.

What do you think?  Any suggestions?  Any similar posts that I've missed?

try this ....

http://www.chess.com/article/view/study-plan-directory

Tactics is definitely something you should focus on as it will bring the most noticable improvement for you. Right now I try to study at least 1hr/day, more if possible. I use the Solitaire Chess by Bruce Pandolfini that you find in Chess Life Magazine ( I was given a huge stack of them from a friend), and play one of those games out daily. If your not familar with what Solitaire Chess is, it is a game played between two masters and you take one side and guess their moves out through the game, writing your analysis of each move and so forth, and seeing where you differ. The reason I like the Solitaire Chess games by Bruce Pandolfini is he annotates them and gives you points based on your answers and analysis, and deducts points sometimes too. This makes it easier to understand where my flaws are during these games. A game usually takes about 25-30 minutes to go through. I spend about 15-20 minutes on tactics then and the rest of the time I spend on end game practice, either setting up a random end game position and playing it out, or recently I am taking end game positions from a master game and going over them, similar to Solitaire Chess, and seeing where I differ and figuring out why.

To sum it up:

Solitaire Chess (analyzing a master game)- 25-30minutes.

Tactics- 15-20 minutes.

End game Study- Rest of time (10-20minutes).

Hope that helps give you an idea. :)

Unfortunately in chess there to date has not been an extensive breakdown of how exactly tactics impacts strategy and vice versa.  This may be due to the extensive hierarchy of the chess board and the rules.  As the game goes on what is more and more is important is an understanding of shape and positions and how to pick moves that are forceful and will lead to you as the initiator of what happens next.  Control of space through correct positions is oftentimes much more important than point values in terms of pieces.  If your position is incorrect how many pieces is perhaps irrelevant as you will not be able to work through a blocked position.  All this being said, perhaps instead of just studying chess it would benefit you to study Go problems, or wei-chi as it is called.  This game is much older than chess, probably at least 1500 years and has an extensive breakdown for training:  life and death; tsumego; joseki; fuseki.  Go is much more focused on position than immediate tactics.  Say for example you do a tactic and your opponent ignores you and does something else?  So while tactics does intertwine with strategy, the problem of what to study when is pretty complex.  You must understand how your brain works and where your weakness are.  For myself I find that in chess due to the fixed structure I must understand openings.  In general endgame and middle game I dont have problems.  How the positions impact the later tactics is what is important for me, hence the necessity to set up correctly.