Welcome to this week’s newsletter of Say Chess. The newsletter now goes out to 3,366 subscribers and 53 paid subscribers. I really appreciate the support! If you have not yet subscribed consider doing it if you like subjects like chess improvement, chess book publishing, and articles about the chess world.
Now that the Puzzle Rush/Storm Challenge is over I will start looking at all the scores and send out a summary newsletter next week. Really excited to find out if we improved. And a big thank you to all who participated and filled out that Google Form so many times!
Tracking your chess training
For this week’s newsletter, I want to pour some energy into the accountability group and chess training tracker. Last year I started a training group where you can track your chess training using a service called Clockify. It is free and readers of the newsletter can join.
I have created different training categories (projects) that you can use for tracking your training. The main goal is to help you stay accountable. You cannot track rapid or blitz chess, so it will also help you focus on playing longer games if you are a blitz addict.
One of the members who has been tracking since the beginning, Nick, was recently on the Chess Journeys podcast, where he and Kevin talked about how he has been tracking his chess training. I thought it was really motivational to hear Nick talk about his experience so I asked if I could reshare it here.
Transcription of the conversation
Kevin: You said in our communication that one of the things that helped you was the Say Chess Accountability Group. How is that added to your improvement?
Nick: It helps me know what I'm actually studying, because it's really easy for me to run through chessable for. If I have, like, 500 moves to review, I could spend an hour doing that, and I wouldn't even think about it. But did I spend any amount of time close to that playing rapid games, or did I spend any time studying tactics or whatever? So it's kind of like part of the accountability isn't just like, the hour count because he split those into different groups. It was just being able to see what I'm actually doing, what I'm studying, and being conscious of it.
And also, if I look at my list of things that I've done, I can see, oh, I haven't studied this in a couple of days. Maybe I should do puzzle survival for 30 minutes or something. Right. And it also just helps me keep track of when I've done my daily requirement of 1 hour of studying. At this point, I'm studying ready for an hour a day or more. Right. But at least I'm tracking it. And so I like using the app that he has set up for that. I also like checking in every week and just, like, talking with other people who are doing the same thing you're doing to see how they're doing. How did you do this week, what you doing next week? What didn't work out, what worked? That's been really helpful just to have a community of people to talk with.
Chesspunks is kind of like that, but this is like a specific group that's really about training. Not just like playing chess, but training and putting your money where your mouth is as far as how much time you're going to put into the game. So I think that's really helpful. I can't attribute ELO Gains to that necessarily. I just think that it helps me keep going. It's a good motivator.
Kevin: Okay. Yeah. I started doing that briefly, and I don't know what it was. For some reason, I was like, I don't feel like pressuring myself to click all these boxes. But you know what? That was when I was feeling more self-motivated and doing more. I was like, I don't need this to keep me going. And I'm just, like, thinking about last night, and I was, like, studying more games. I just didn't and I did other stuff, and if I had been checking boxes, I'd have been like, oh, wait, I didn't check that box. I need to get on that. So I don't know. Now I'm rethinking this. Maybe I need to rejoin this idea because you said you found it helpful.
Nick: Yeah. I mean, part of this, to me, it's not, like, obligatory. I just like doing it. Right. I think that's, like, the hard thing about chess is that there are certain aspects of chess study that feel more like we're obliged to do it than we are to enjoy it. And I try not to worry about that. Or part of it is I just really like studying games, or I really like playing rapid games, or I really like having. Knowing that I have one thing that I need to do for an hour a day that just helps me keep going and keeps me motivated. That's really like Kostya Kavutskiy's idea was to just set whatever thing you want to do for an hour a day. You do that until it's done, 1 hour at a time, and then you can do whatever other stuff you want to do.
That kind of helps me rein in all of my Chessable purchases because I might have like five or six half-eaten sandwiches on the table, but there's this new sandwich that looks really good. It's got bacon on it. And so I'm just going to ignore all these other sandwiches and they're just going to become moldy. Right? There's like mental sandwiches in my brain, right? So I'm just getting moldy mental sandwiches in my brain and I'm so focused on this bacon sandwich and then I forget all the benefits of everything else that I was studying before. So this is nice because, okay, yeah, I'm going to buy a book on Kindle or I'm going to buy this Chessable book, but I first have this thing that I'm going to finish doing. I committed to doing it an hour a day until it's done. And so that's been really helpful.
Kevin: Well. Yeah, I also really just like the idea of being able to track over time what I did for my first year, I had a Google Doc and I can flip through that and be like, oh, that's right, I read this book for this long. Yeah, months. And now I have none of that. And I'm really regretful, I'm like, wait, what did I do in the last year? And have to look at my shelf and be like, oh yeah, I read that. I read two chapters that I just love the idea of being able to look back.
If you want to join the accountability group you can send me an email at saychess1@gmail.com and I will add you to the Clockify-group.
Besides the tracking in Clockify, we do a check-in each Monday, where we share what went well and not so well the past week, so remember to join the Say Chess chat in the app or web browser.
If you have any questions just hit the comment button.
Finally, I just want to recommend that you listen to the Chess Journeys Podcast!
/Martin