Continuing the whole "Chess as life" theme, does chess help you manage your time better? Mark Scully, a regular reader and background contributor to this blog, send me an article titled "The secret to a calm life" The article makes references to using chess type strategies, including looking ahead and developing strategies. And like chess, the author suggests that time management skils can be improved through practice.
While this all makes sense, I am not convinced that chess players themselves would make the best example of time managers. Apart from getting into time trouble or wasting time analysing irrelevant lines, chess players often turn up late for rounds, forget to bring their own pen, or leave it until the last minute to enter an event.
The fact that chess players behave this way is somewhat curious to me, as all competitive chess is played with a time limit, unlike a lot of non chess activities. If anything playing chess should teach you how to efficiently use your time, how to make quick decisions under pressure, and to trade off accuracy for speed as the situation arises. And yet it does not seem to. Why?
1 comment:
Probably true in general, but I also think a very high chess ability correlates with better time management in general. Being able to quickly identify what is most important in a position, tournament or one's chess training also helps with clarifying what is most important in a real life situation - it's surprising how often what we need to play good chess is very similar to what we need to be productive.
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