Over the past weeks, I’ve gotten more and more excited about my upcoming work projects. I had so many ideas. But when I sat down to actually plan the quarter, I realized I won’t have time for most of them.
I started by writing down everything I wanted to do.
- New course ideas.
- A big investigative YouTube video I’ve been researching for months.
- In-depth YouTube content.
- Updating my eBook.
- Writing a chess improvement book.
- Re-Launching my Chess Training Planner.
- Improvements to my web pages.
- Several vibe-coding projects I’ve been tinkering with.
What you see above is already a highly curated list (when I did this for a yearly planning I came up with 43 project ideas). So I felt that’s reasonable. I got excited. Let’s do this!
But then, my mood shifted quickly.
Let’s Do The Actual Math
In my head, I planned with roughly 12 weeks of 30 hours. I still am mindful to not overdo it with work, otherwise my TBI symptoms flare up. 360 hours is going a long way.
But wait a moment.
I’ll take a 2 week holiday. 300 hours left.
Small trip to Italy to visit Alessia’s family. 276 hours left.
Recurring work for newsletter, Podcast, YouTube videos, emails, Real Chess Training Tests + solution videos, 1:1 Lessons and SCIS community work. 126 hours left.
Occasional calls with other creators. Accounting. 105 hours left.
That’s my real number for the entire quarter. That’s not even a third of what I imagined.
How Long Do These Projects Actually Take?
So then I started diving deeper into the time each of my projects likely take until completion. Not what I hope for, but what it likely will be.
My previous courses took me 6+ months to work on. Easily 500+ hours on it’s own. Let alone a proper book, which is an even bigger project.
But even the other “small” projects add up very quickly:
- In-depth YouTube content —> 10 hour + per video, 1/week = 120 hours.
- Improvements to my web pages —> A couple dozen hours easily per homepage. Estimation if I did everything ~50 hours.
- Vibe-coding —> a first beta-launch site is very easy. But something that is really worth using for improvers? 30 hours.
Even excluding courses and the book, what I had in mind was work that takes 500+ hours easily. It wouldn’t even be possible if I had the full quarter without any other obligations.
What was a nice fiction in my head became a frustrating reality on paper.
So I Chose
I pushed myself to choose which trade-offs I wanted to make. The final decision was simple.
- Finish unfinished work first (RCT re-launch, investigative YouTube video, Accounting)
- Work on the biggest pain point: a selected few web pages.
That’s it. Two things. Everything else went on a “not now” list.
But then something strange happened. Within a day or two, I felt lighter than I had in weeks. The low-grade stress I hadn’t even noticed I was carrying, just gone. Because the internal argument was over. I wasn’t constantly wondering whether I should be working on this thing or that thing. I knew exactly what I was doing. And I knew everything else could wait.
Because I chose only these 2 things, I now know I should get these things done in ~70 hours. That means I have a 35 hour buffer.
For TBI days. For allergy days. When the project ends up taking much longer than I expected. For days when a friend or my wife needs my help and I love to have that flexibility.
The Freedom of Accepting Your Limits
Oliver Burkeman writes in Four Thousand Weeks that our anxiety about time doesn’t come from having too little of it.
It comes from refusing to accept that we’ll never have enough for everything we want to do.
We keep carrying every idea, every project, every ambition, and the weight of all those unchosen options is what makes us feel behind, even when we’re working hard.
The moment you stop fighting that and actually choose, the weight lifts.
That is exactly what happened to me. Being faced with the reality that I have way more projects than time really sucked. But choosing what really matters, accepting the trade-offs, and focusing on only two things allowed me to feel free for the first time in months.
And I realized once again that knowing what to do is much easier than actually doing it.
This is exactly what I teach inside the Simplified Chess Improvement System for your chess training. Strip away the extras. Choose the few things that actually matter. Let everything else wait.
I always understood this intellectually. But going through the emotional pain of it myself, watching my exciting project list get cut down to two, made me realize why it is so hard for my students. Understanding the concept is one thing. Actually letting go is another.
But once you do, something shifts. As one of my SCIS students put it recently:
“Removing all the self-added extras and basically ‘just’ doing the SCIS training consciously feels way better, and it’s more deliberate and calm. The quality and focus has definitely improved.”
That is the feeling on the other side.
Keep improving,
GM Noël Studer
PS: This article was initially sent out to my Newsletter list. If you want to get chess improvement advice for free in your inbox, join 17,000+ chess improvers by signing up for Friday Grandmaster Insights here.
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