This week was disappointing, as I only managed a little over half of my target time, with 5 hours and 15 minutes.  I did have a fairly big piece of uni work due in, but still, with better planning I could have managed 10 hours.  The breakdown follows, and as usual I haven’t counted time spent following super-GM tournaments (Tata Steel):

Monday: 15 minutes CT-Art 4.0, 5 minutes playing a blitz game, ~30 minutes analysing and playing moves in my correspondence games (spread over the week)

Tuesday: 30 minutes playing blitz on PlayChess

Wednesday: 10 minutes watching GM Daniel King’s analysis of the recent game between Vishy Anand and Wang Hao

Thursday: 30 minutes playing online blitz

Friday: 40 minutes opening preparation

Saturday: 10 minutes CT-Art, 45 minutes playing a strong player at the university chess club, 20 minutes analysing an endgame position, 25 minutes opening preparation

Sunday: 40 minutes playing a 15 5 game + analysis

In addition to not fitting in enough hours, there’s also clearly been too much blitz this week, so I’m setting myself some rules for this term’s study.  I think my holiday training plan was a good one, so the rules (listed in order of precedence) are based on that.

Rule 1: 30 minutes of tactics training (mostly CT-Art) per day – no other chess can be done on a given day until this is complete, with the exception of scheduled events such as league games or lessons.

Rule 2: The next chess I do following a serious game should be analysis of that game.

Rule 3: At least 1 hour of opening, middlegame and endgame training should be done per week; until these are complete no other chess can be done (with the exception of that specified by previous rules).

I’ll be aiming for 10 hours a week for the next two weeks, increased to 12 hours thereafter.  I’ll also be cutting the number of sources of study material down to one for each area, in an effort to make good progress with that source.  As you can see, these rules make it significantly harder for me to whittle away the hours playing online blitz!  Let me know your thoughts.