What's for you "working hard" in chess? Share your experiences and how it benefitted your play.

There seems to be a quite different understanding of "working hard" among us players. What does it mean "you need to work hard" and "no pain no gain" or you need put "really great effort into it", for you?
Is it studying an opening line, for a number of nights, till late, for a month? Is it solving 500 puzzles in a single day? Anything else?
Please share your experience - only real and practical things YOU did - and what was the benefit that it has brought to you and your play.
I'll go first and tell mine: whether very debatable, I'm going thru Michael de la Maza's drills for forks and skewers. It requires me approx 1h per day to just do the drills. It's not that much, but it is annoying and repetitive, and these are two aspects that make me perceive it as "hard" to bring home every day. In terms of benefits, I notice that I'm able to do the drills every day quicker than the previous one, so it may (hopefully) help with my speed in recognizing forks and skewers opportunities in OTB games.
Now it's your turn to share!

Analyzing games is part of my hard work, but also ~50 puzzles per day. Analyzing the games is good for cleaning up weak openings.

Hi Chris, thank you. 50 puzzles really would be a lot for me! Do you select any specific kind of puzzles, or you simply solve them one after the other?

The best chess book I've ever read is Pawn Power in Chess by Hans Kmoch. It must have added hundreds of points to my playing strength... eventually. After a few re-readings.

But you really need to WORK to benefit from it.

Kmoch invents his own language (Not kidding! I wish I was!) for describing Pawn formations... with words like front-span, rear-span, lee, luff, straggler, isolani, twin, ram, duo, lever, leucopenia, malanopenia, chain, base, etc.

You must LEARN this new language, or his book remains totally incomprehensible (instead of just difficult to read).

I don't do any of the hard work I just play all day. If I ever get myself to work then I would complete the Arthur yusupov books and do puzzles and analyse my games and try to watch master games everyday. I would consider that as hardwork

Everyday, I do puzzle battle, which for me is ~21 puzzles, then I do 3 puzzles for rating and about ~28 in puzzle rush survival, for a total of ~50.

Wow, hats off. Yes, that for me is hard working on puzzles!

I' ve heard of it, but also that some editions have the old so-called descriptive chess notation, which makes it even harder to read and properly understand. Do you own such version, or a newer one?

Mine is descriptive, not algebraic, correct.

Honestly, since you need to learn a new language in order to use the book ANYWAY, what's the problem with learning a new form of notation?

Play for 1 month to improve in chess by 800elo

But It only works if your a 12nyear old.

Yearold

Well, maybe it's not a big deal, however I'm considering that you're piling up things to learn:

The book contents, I mean the key message it's delivering

The language used by the author

The descriptive notation

Personally, i would aim to focusing 100% on the key thing that the book wants to transmit, without the need of dedicating energies to other, but this is just my opinion.

Analyzing games, learning tricky openings, and doing too much tactics

But the "new language" has a much broader application that just deciphering this one obscure book. After you've read (and re-read, and re-read...) the book, you can then THINK in the new language whenever you look at a chess position!

Even learning descriptive notation has a much broader application than just this one book... many of the best chess books (by Capablanca, Reti, Alekhine, Fischer, etc) were written in descriptive.

Interesting. Thank you.