Immersion 2: Week One Report

I am immersed.

Not as much as I would like to be, perhaps, but as much as I can be in the circumstances. More importantly, I’m more immersed in chess than I was when I posted IMMERSION part 1 seven days ago.

It’s been a good week for sure, but also a bit of a mixed bag.

Things going well:-

15 minutes of Woodpecker Method easy puzzles as a warm up (my idea is that I should be able to score 90-95%+ accuracy at around 30 seconds per position including writing down the answer - the photos on this page are my daily trackers);

Beat the Masters - one puzzle a day;

Playing through Boleslavsky’s games;

Listening to Perpetual Podcast’s Adult Improver series;

Secret project to [Redacted];

Reading Excelling at Chess;

Regular walking;

Things Going Less Well:-

Yusupov - I'm doing very little because I'm simply running out of time;

Reading Tiny Habits - it’s not so much that I don’t like the book - I'm actually finding it pretty thought provoking and helpful - but the author I’m finding increasingly annoying;

Watching one of the films - haven’t got around to it yet;

Things that are going either well or badly, I’m not sure:-

Training Games

Let me explain this one.

I reached my target already playing five games between Thursday afternoon and Saturday evening.

This is all well and good. It’s been productive and fun.

The drawback is that I’ve really not scheduled this very well. All this playing has squeezed out studying, particularly Yusupov. And what am I going to do for the rest of the month? Not play at all - it doesn't seem like a good idea to go so long without a serious game - or to play and cut something else?

So I don't feel playing five games in three days is necessarily a bad thing to have done. The issue I have is that it happened without me deciding that’s what I wanted to do.

Lastly, some general observations:

Immersing yourself in chess, even when you have the week off, isn’t easy as a grown up. The car still needs serving, the lawn still needs mowing, friends and family are still enjoyable to have around.

Sleeping - or more exactly, problematic sleep patterns. To an extent it’s not within my control whether I sleep well or not but that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing I can do about it. Poor sleep earlier in the week definitely restricted my ability to get GTFWD at the start of the week.

Which means it’s something to work on.

I need to plan my schedule better. Partly so I don’t end up with too many games all at once; partly so I make time to fit in other chess stuff I want to do; partly because the life stuff isn’t going away … so I have to get used to planning this chess work around it if I want to keep this going over the long term.