how to train chess when real life things happen
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[00:00:00] Hello and welcome back. You are listening to Next Level Chess podcast. I'm Grandmaster Noël Studer, and today I will have a monologue about how to train chess when real life things happen because well, we all know it. Having a plan is great, but as you guys listening aren't professional chess players, well, things get in the way so it can get chaotic very quickly.

And if you're not prepared for it, this might mean that you get completely out of a rhythm. You stop training chess and before it's too late, you have three months without chess training and ask yourself, how the heck did this happen? So let's talk about what can happen. Family emergencies, intense work periods, illness, sleep issues.

There's many more. I'm sure you're listening to this and you come up with your own things that have happened already before when you had a good routine and then, suddenly, it all evaporates. The point [00:01:00] here is that we can't avoid these problems. And sometimes I feel, myself included, we still try to do that.

We still have this human optimism of, well, this time I will write a plan two hours a day and nothing will happen that will ever interrupt it. But I've done that too many times to now I slowly start to understand it's impossible to avoid it. What actually matters is being prepared for it and how we react once real life things happen and our plan gets disrupted this way.

And today specifically, I want to talk about a idea I've learned from, I would argue he's the master of habits. James Clear, he read this multimillion copy selling book Atomic Habits. It's, I think one of the most sold books ever.

Something along those lines. It's a very, very good book. I really enjoy it. And on his blog and [00:02:00] in a podcast I've heard he gave this additional advice. I don't think it's in the book, which is super, super interesting, which is called Reduce the Scope, Stick to the Routine. So as the key to improvement is consistency.

The the point is that our biggest goal is not that we have to have a two hour plan per day, let's say, and always stick to it. But we need to train a little bit. We need to keep doing something because if we stop doing proper chess training, by the way, I'm really here talking about planned chess training.

Okay? It can be that you have periods of your life where you still are exposed to chess content, but you're not really training, and that means that your chess improvement will stagnate. So it's not just time spent on chess, but it's actually time planned, and then consciously doing the things that matter most to try to improve your game.

And the idea of this reduced scope, stick to the routine is whenever something unexpected happens, or [00:03:00] sometimes you actually know that a future period will be busy, so you can plan ahead and you try to stick to the same amount of training in terms of training sessions, but you reduce the scope.

So instead of training two hours, you might train 10 minutes. But the important thing is that you're actually doing these 10 minutes because you can keep the consistency. Once the stressful period is over, you can always increase the training load again. The problem is if we are going to zero, if the habit is going away, then it's so much harder to start again.

And I wanna give a real life example here from a student in my Simplified Chess Improvement System. The student, Louis, has continuously every single week planned their training. Very nice. Shared it in the community. And there was one post that caught my eye because he realized that an upcoming [00:04:00] work period will be very stressful and that chess will probably be a little bit more tricky.

So let's look at this example and see how it was very nice that he recognized it, but how I would even apply this method of James Clear, reduce the scope, stick to the routine, even stronger to his plan. So here's what he shared in the Simplified Chess Improvement System community. This is a quote.

Now, the upcoming weeks are the real test of my consistency with this training method in my workplace. Weekly environmental field work activities have been scheduled, and the government requires our outputs. By the end of the year, it'll involve waking up early every weekday to travel to the very depressed study sites, initiating work until noon, having a short lunch break afterwards, returning to work until it gets too dark to see, and then heading back to the accommodations to prepare for the next day.

In other words, the [00:05:00] probability of missing training due to sheer tiredness on a weekday is high. I would try to get around this by starting the training even earlier than I do right now because I know that I would be too exhausted to train after all the field work for the day is done. I just hope I won't lose too much sleep. End of quote.

So this is really a grueling work schedule. And I'm sure, busy adult improvers at home, you might say, oh yeah, I've had this before as well. Maybe not exactly like that, but something along those lines. So how do we adjust? Here is what Louis planned in this week. It's basically waking up earlier.

He planned a training session usually on weekdays from 4.30 to 5 tactics. And then from 5.05 to 5.35, so the first hour of the day, basically with I think that was Chessable review. So that was the simplified training plan. One hour every single [00:06:00] morning, waking up earlier to be able to train chess.

Now, this sounds very commendable because it's very dedicated. It's very ambitious to say, okay, I have a very difficult work period. Let's just wake up earlier and then train chess when I have the best focus possible. But the risk is too high, in my opinion, because here we're talking about reducing your sleep to be able to train chess.

We're not reducing screen time or watching a Netflix movie and going to bed earlier. But there is just a workload that Louis needs to fulfill, and then there's not that many hours left until well waking up at 4.30. And sometimes actually, I'm looking on the plan now, sometimes even 3.30 in the morning, right?

So that would be quite risky. So using this method, or having this idea in the back of my mind, I'll read out what my answer was in the community. So this is again, a [00:07:00] quote that's from myself.

Wow, that sounds indeed like a very busy period for you. Here's what I do in your shoes. Point number one, set the bar incredibly low. Maybe start with 10 minutes a day for these super intense weeks. So instead of an hour planned training, 10 minutes. Point Number two, don't sacrifice sleep for chess. If you can go to sleep earlier to wake up earlier, that can work. But I wouldn't trade one hour extra chess for one hour less sleep. And point number three, play mostly for fun when you feel like it, with no expectations for your play or results.

You will then get into a rhythm and understand if you can just keep the schedule or increase it step by step. It is just about keeping your head in chess a little bit. In this period, you'll be able to do more intense training where work slows down again, end of quote.

So you can see that my advice here is really to reduce much more and not having these, I would say, [00:08:00] hidden expectations or hidden hopes. Let's call them hopes, right? That even though the period is extremely difficult, that there will be some way to squeeze in the chess training. And by the way, this is just a general remark.

I don't think it's ever worth it to cut back on your sleep for chess training. You need to cut out other things in your life. And I know many people are busy, but let's also be honest, we spend hours and hours on screens, and I would say that's nearly everybody listening to this. So we can cut out screen time, go to sleep earlier, and then wake up earlier if we want that.

If it's important enough. If that's not possible in this super intense period for Luis, then do not just shorten your sleep. Your brain will work so much worse and it's not going to pay off like this. Just this trade off sleep sacrifice for chess training, not going to work. Not recommended at all.

Why is [00:09:00] this kind of idea so powerful? Why does this work? Why is it so good that we reduce the time and then we stick to the schedule? It's very important to remind ourselves that chess improvement is a marathon and not a sprint. Some of you might say, well, but I have a two month, three month work period like that.

If you want to improve your chess in the next 2, 3, 5, 10 years, what are three months? Let's reduce it a little bit for three months, that's okay. And then you can increase it again. Now, if you're saying, well, but I'm always super busy, then I just have to tell you, then you need to find trade-offs.

Like we can't, let's say, have five hobbies, a family, watch out for the children, work... Like, somewhere there will be a trade off. And you will need to choose that for yourself. So if you always feel like you have a super busy period, you need to say, is chess improvement really that important?

And if chess improvement is that important, you need to find something else that needs to take a little step [00:10:00] back and then you can spend more time on chess improvement. Again, do not cut back on the sleep, that's not going to work long term. It's not a sprint, it's a marathon. So I can really relate to this idea of grinding through it, pushing through it, doing the hard thing, waking up early.

And I've tried this so many times. And, as I mentioned already, slowly but surely, I'm starting to learn this lesson. So this is not going to work.

The whole point here really is when I make this marathon, not a sprint analogy, is that the key is that we stick to something. Like, chess improvement with decent focus or with a plan is staying in our life with 10 minutes a day. But it's staying in our life. It's not completely kicked out, and that will make it so much easier.

Later on to get back to a routine where you say, okay, now it's actually time to improve your game. Now it's actually time to do 30 minutes a day, 60 minutes a [00:11:00] day, 90 minutes a day, whatever feels appropriate later on is just so much more likely that you're actually doing that. Because I've seen people, again, also in the same Simplified Chess Improvement System community.

I've seen people come back after like eight months and say, I didn't train anything for eight months. How did that happen? Well, at some point probably over doing it, then having a hard period, then saying, well, I'm not being able to do two hours a day, so let me just do zero. And then one week follows another, and it gets a habit to not train chess properly.

And then getting back is so freaking difficult. So this is the same pattern. What happens to me? What happens to many of my students? What happens to people that I observe is, you have an ideal training plan, you're super excited when it works, kind of have start having this expectation that it will always be like that.

There will be a smaller or bigger hiccup, something in your life happening. [00:12:00] Then we have this like, oh, I can't do the full plan, so let me just do nothing. And then this kind of waking up moment, a few weeks or months later. Wait, how did I just stop training chess at all? Or sometimes it's even, you don't really think about it.

You just play, but you don't train anymore. And at some point you're like, why am I not improving anymore? Or why is my rating going down? And then you realize, oh, I, I haven't put in any work. I haven't put in any real work in the past months, and that's why my chess is getting worse.

So yeah, the key insight here is really just keep a routine, keep writing a training plan, no matter how small it is. Don't make trade offs like giving up sleep, that's not really recommended. It will not work long term, but find like 5, 10, 15 minutes a day. You can definitely find this amount of time and do something properly.

And usually in these periods, as I've mentioned in my response to Luis. [00:13:00] Don't try playing games, or don't expect good results in this period, because this period is not about chess growth. This period is just, okay, staying above water, sticking to something in chess improvement, but your chess is probably not going to get better.

Like with this kind of workload, with already reduced sleep, as we know from Louis' example. Is the chess really going to be amazing? No, probably not. So if you're going to play, reduce your expectations, maybe play on an account, you don't care about the rating as much, or just say yourself, okay, it's fine if I play and I have fun, even if I lose a hundred rating points, I'll win that back later.

But have the right mindset. You can't be in a super stressful period, not really train a lot and expect results to happen. Reducing our expectation, reducing the amount of training time, but sticking to something is really what matters, or how James Clear says it himself. I will link the article, How to [00:14:00] Stick to Your Goals When Life gets Crazy.

He says at the end of it, quote, when you can't do it all, do something small.

That's it for me. See ya next week.