We recently posted about how to track your training with Toggl, with blog guest Martin B. Justesen sharing some of his thoughts from The Say Chess Blog.
We promised to revisit the subject and here is Martin’s update.
The first part ended with the words: ‘When you start tracking you can follow your weekly progress and see how you spend your time on chess’ and that leads us very nicely into part two.
Training With Toggl Update
My study and playing time on the first week of using Toggl
Additionally, you also get mailed a weekly report with everything broken down. Under each project there are subsections with the specific tasks.
What I did notice after the first week of tracking is that I’m getting less distracted since I don’t want to stop the time. It is also a bit more motivating to pick up a book like 1234 Endgame Studies from the bookshelf when I can see some kind of result from it. Even though I’m just tracking the training time it is making a difference…at least for me. It might be compared to tracking a long run on a running app.
‘Most runners choose to track data to keep an eye on progress and make sure they are staying accountable during training. Those reasons alone are enough of a benefit to the process; it is the basis for keeping a training log. However, as noted above, it is what you do with that data that is important.’
6 October 2017 Why You Should Track Your Training | MapMyRun
Accountability towards chess training and putting in the time is definitely something I can use to reach my goal, and I think others can as well. Chess players mostly track their rating progress. Rating progress is basically the end result, and the result of the training you have done. It, therefore, makes more sense to track the training time instead of the rating progress.
I will from now on systematically start tracking my training time and explore if it makes a difference over the long run.
Write in the comments of my blog if you want to try this method together with me.
I have now tracked my chess training for two weeks with Toggl. It is helping me stay mindful about how I use the time I have carved out for chess. I managed to get 10 hours of chess practice and playing last week.
My main focus was on Chessable and playing rapid chess. This week I would like to get my playing time down a bit and invest it in more study.
Thank you, Martin, for your very interesting Training With Toggl Update.
Further updates will undoubtedly follow. Meanwhile, why not sign up for Martin’s newsletter and also follow him in these places:
