Episode 91 - Why Planning Can Be So Frustrating (But Important)
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[00:00:00] Hey, and welcome back to Next Level Chess podcast. I'm grandmaster Noël Studer, and today I want to talk about how planning is so important, but it can actually be pretty frustrating. So I recently planned my second quarter. I was a little bit in delay. Yep, yep. I got very excited because I had so many ideas. Then when I actually did the planning, it turned more into frustration and then into relief. Let's take it step by step.

So usually when I realize that I have so many ideas and I get super excited, I have the danger of working too much. So that's why I sit down and I say, okay, let's just plan, let's assign priorities. And what [00:01:00] I do is to write down all of the ideas that I have. And what I now read out is already a highly curated list.

So I had a few new course ideas. I worked on a big investigative YouTube video that I've been researching for over a month already. Ideas of more in-depth YouTube content. I wanted to update my ebook, write a chess improvement book. Got very excited about this idea. I wanted to relaunch my chess training planner. For those following me for a long time, I did sell a chess training planner over Amazon. Took it down maybe one and a half years ago with the plan to renew it. I haven't gotten to it since then. I wanna do improvements to many of my web pages. And I even had some vibe coding projects I've been tinkering with already, working on many more ideas. Yeah, I know everybody is working on vibe coding.

And as mentioned, this is already a highly curated list. When I did this for my yearly planning, I came up [00:02:00] with 43 project ideas. This list already feels like very reasonable. I had to already put away like 35 of these ideas. But then I started doing the actual math, like how much time do I actually have in this second quarter?

And quickly my mood went downhill. So in my head I just thought, okay, I have 12 weeks, roughly 30 hours a week. That's usually what I work to not overdo it with my traumatic brain injury. Because otherwise, the symptoms are coming back. So it's like 360 hours, right? You're thinking, oh yeah, 360 hours.

That's pretty good. But then I started thinking about all the things that actually take up time that are not these new projects. I'll take it a week holiday. It's already 300 hours left only. I'll do a small trip to Italy to visit my wife's family. 276 hours left. Then I started writing down the recurring work I need for newsletter, podcasts, YouTube videos, like simpler YouTube [00:03:00] videos, emails, creating the Real Chess Training tests, solution videos, one-on-one lessons. My Simplified Chess Improvement System community work, and I took away 150 hours. So I'm only there with a hundred twenty five, twenty six hours.

Then I wrote down, oh, I have occasional calls with other creators, have to do accounting, which is very annoying. I hate accounting, but yeah. 105 hours left.

And so that's my real number for the entire quarter. If I'm honest. And I'm realistic. It's 105 hours deep work that I have to push forward any sort of project. It's not 360, it's 105. Not even a third.

And then there is another part of this that usually we are very optimistic when we want to estimate how long a project takes. So I started writing down how much would each project take now, first and foremost, [00:04:00] a new course? Well, both my courses that I've worked on, they have been easily 500 plus hours of work.

So that would be already five times of what I have. So I would have to put away five quarters for this. Not going to happen right now. But even smaller projects are really adding up very quickly because if I say, oh, I wanna make an in-depth YouTube content where I really research very deeply. I do a lot of preparation for those. Well then if I do one every single week, I roughly take 10 hour for a video, and that's already 120 hours if I want to publish one every week. So it's already too much.

Improvements to my homepages. What can take couple dozen hours easily per site? There are a few, so I was like estimating 50 hours.

Then vibe coding. I mean, nowadays it's so easy to get a kind of a mockup, a kind of beta launch site. But actually having something that is really useful that is not just wasting your guys' time, but it's actually really doing something [00:05:00] will take a lot more time. So at least 30 hours with then maybe customer support and whatever. It's much more than that.

And so even excluding the biggest tasks, which is like new courses and the book, I get easily over 500 hours. And that wouldn't be even possible if I would just delete everything else, right? Not going to holidays, not doing weekly recurring work. Never answer an email anymore. I still only have 360 hours, so it's not going to happen.

So then it you feel like, oh yeah. All of my projects that I have in my brain, all of the ideal castle that I built is just crumbling together.

But then something happens, and this is not the first time it happens. I just felt it very, very strongly this time. Once I pushed myself to choose, okay, what are the things that really matter? What are the trade offs I'm going to do and which things are not going to be worked on in this quarter? I decided to finish the unfinished work, which is investigative YouTube video, [00:06:00] accounting, Real Chess Training relaunch that happened already.

And then work on the single biggest pain point, which I believed is my web stuff. So how my homepages look. These are two things basically. So finish unfinished work, work on my webpages. And everything else went to the not now list.

And within a day or two, something happened. I started feeling less stressed than in previous week. Because the internal argument was over. This is so important, because somewhere deep down we usually know that we don't have time for all of these things that we would like to do. And when we're not clear about that, that creates that consistent stress and that's exactly what happens in chess as well, right?

When we have these exaggerated expectations of our output of what we can do, what we can work on, our body feel stress because like, dude, when are we going to do that? Like, what dreams are you dreaming? [00:07:00] When? When is the time for all of what you would love to do?

And so for me that just means finally being more light, really focusing on what matters and being able to say, I have great dreams, I have great goals. I want to do so many of these things still, but it's just not right now. I don't need to stress myself, I'm not going to get to them in this quarter.

And what I even did is instead of filling the 105 hours, this is something that happens to me as well so often, is to actually allow myself a buffer time to say, okay, let's take on projects that roughly take 70 hours. So I have 30 hours, 35 hours of buffer because I still sometimes have traumatic brain injury days where I can't really focus, or maybe I work two hours instead of six.

It's also going to be the allergy period. I have a very strong allergy for a few years now. May and June are terrible, so sometimes I just wake up at three in the morning with throat ache and red eyes, and I can't sleep anymore. So the work on the [00:08:00] next day is not going to be amazing.

And then some projects probably will take longer than I expected. And you also make time for that.

And this acceptance is really what allowed me to breathe and to say, oh, let's relax. Because Oliver Berkman, one of my favorite authors, by the way, writes in 4,000 weeks, which is one of my favorite books, that our anxiety about time doesn't come from having too little of it. It comes from a refusing to accept that we'll never have enough for everything we want to do.

So we keep carrying every idea, every project, every ambition, and the weight of all of those unchosen options. And that's what makes us feel behind. Even when we're working hard, 'cause we can work hard, but usually what happens, at least with me, is when I work hard on one project, I just come up with two, three more ideas. So there's always more ideas than time that I actually can execute stuff.

But the moment that we stop [00:09:00] fighting this and start realizing the honest truth about our life, we don't have enough time for everything. And start choosing, making these trade-offs. We stop feeling that anxiety, that stress, that pressure. And this is exactly what happened in this case.

And I also realized that knowing something is so much easier than actually doing it. Because basically this is exactly what I'm teaching Simplified Chess Improvement System for your chess training. I'm saying, Hey, you don't have time for everything. Let's focus on what is really super important.

I'll tell you what exactly you need to do, how you need to do it. You can allow yourself to forget about so many things. Put them away. Don't do extras. Choose the few things. Accept the trade-offs. Let everything else wait. Don't need to perfect your openings. All of that is things that I'm teaching. And I do understand that intellectually. But then there is an emotional side to this.

And I think that emotional side, it made me [00:10:00] just realize even more that this emotional side is what holds so many of us back. It's not the logical kind of understanding, oh, I have not enough time, I need to choose. But actually emotionally, having so many ideas, seeing so many problem areas in your chess or so many potential courses you could do, so many exciting things you could study.

And then actually sitting down and saying, Hey, I don't have that much time. I have so many other things to do in my life as well. And so I need to choose. And even if you have every single day, by the way, even if you're a professional player and you have six hours a day. It's not going to be enough to study everything that seems interesting. You'll never get to an end.

So for however much time we invest into chess, it's always about accepting the trade off that you can't do everything. When you shift this, when you say, okay, let's just do the absolute most important things and allow myself to relax and not do the other things. That's actually when that weight goes away, the anxiety goes away, the stress goes [00:11:00] away, and you can allow yourself to enjoy the training, to focus on what really matters.

And that made me think of a quote from a student recently in the Simplified Chess Improvement System. I'll share it here. Quote. Removing all the self-added extras and basically just doing the Simplified Chess Improvement System training consciously feels way better, and it's more deliberate and calm. The quality and focus has definitely improved. End of quote. So this is the feeling that I got personally in my business now, even if it sucked to do it. So I highly recommend that you sit down. You write out your options, how much time you have, and then you take a real decision on what actually matters, what you really need to invest your time in, and all of the things that you're not going to do, not going to touch right now.

And if you want help in that, then check out Simplified Chess Improvement System, because that's basically what we're doing in this [00:12:00] course. I'll walk you through this way of understanding what really matters. Cut out everything else and see that this will be enough to push forward your chess.

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