How Effectively Are You Using Your Chess Time?

“Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend.”
Theophrastus

2020 is finally over – so today I want to share a few thoughts which will hopefully make 2021 more fruitful for you.

We start the year in different locations, with different goals, surrounded by different people. Some of us are wealthy, while some of us are poor. Different things, bad and good, will happen to all of us.

The only thing that we all have in common? – Time!
We have the same amount of time, the only commodity on Earth given equally to every human being.

The equality of time is universal

All of us have a different height, different weight, and different color of skin – but the one thing we all have in common is time. 
A billionaire and a beggar are both given 24 hours per day.

This is something very important to realize. Why? Because...

We can’t control many things in our lives – but we can control how effectively we spend our time.

During the pandemic, I’ve seen chess players who were bored due to a lack of tournaments and couldn’t find the motivation to work on their chess. This includes Grandmasters who were spending their time in very ineffective ways.

On the other hand, I’ve seen professionals, who continued to work on their chess skills, learned new openings, sharpened their calculations, etc.

All of them were living during the pandemic. All of them couldn’t play many tournaments. And all of them had the same amount of days in the year.

The only difference was how they spent their time.

This year, when tournaments restart again, some people will blame the pandemic for their bad results, while others will laugh.

And now I have a question for you:
Can you honestly say to yourself that last year you used your time effectively?

– If you answered no, do you know why?
Perhaps you were distracted, tired, or had problems with your mindset.

Try to learn the right lesson from your mistakes and fix them.

Time is like money. You can choose to spend it wisely, or you can squander it.

Let’s imagine you have 2 hours each day to work on your chess.
You can choose to spend those two hours very differently.

You could play 1+0 bullet chess and watch a Twitch stream. Alternatively, you could spend your time reading a book or watching a course that your coach has recommended. It’s all up to you.

But in the end, how you spend your time will be the deciding factor of whether or not you achieve your goals.

Time cannot be stopped. You can never buy more time. You can never slow time down. And you can never speed time up.

What you can do is control how you use it, as what you spend your time on determines who you will become.

Last year, did you spend your time effectively, or did you squander it?

Whatever your answer is, you can’t change it now – the year has already passed. But what you can do is to learn from your mistakes and make sure you don’t repeat them again.

I hope this article causes you to stop and think about how you’re using your time and if there are ways you could be spending it more effectively.

Best of luck this year!

P.S. On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate the effectiveness of your time management last year? What changes are you going to make this year?

Feel free to share your thoughts in our forum.
And don’t forget to share the article with your friends, who might not be spending their time wisely.

P.P.S. To learn how to make the best use of your time, read this article. Here I’ve shared some useful tips, based on my own experience(and mistakes!) on how to use your time productively.