It's my move, what do I do?

Do I have a check? Can I mate? Wait, there's nothing to do, do I push a pawn? Is that weakening? What if I'm allowing a tactic? WAIT! Is there really nothing to do? Do I have a threat? Oh shit I have 14 seconds...oh GOD now I'm doing PIPI in my pampers!!! 

There's almost always a lot to consider when you're deciding on a move in a chess position. I'm going to try to lay out a guideline on things to consider in a position. Needless to say, it's not a checklist that you will have the luxury to step through for every move. My goal is to automate these processes into my candidate move selection process. I briefly talk about this in my knowledge vs skills blog entry. Anyway the point of this post will be to provide a guide to approach choosing the type of move you should be calculating in a game. I won't go into specific calculating-techniques, instead this will give an order for deciding which moves to consider.

What do I do?

Basically, I think you must think tactically first since that can swing the game the most drastically in the immediate future. If you think you have a forced mate-in-two, finding and calculating that is going to take precedence over a strategic maneuver to get your knight to a better square, for example. Thinking tactically comes more naturally to most of us since we are most likely studying tactical positions a lot more. An obvious knight-fork is probably going to jump out at most people much more clearly than an equally "obvious" pawn sac or rook lift. You must also think about your opponent's plans too, say if you have a fork to win the exchange but you see your opponent will have a mating threat if you play that, then you need to consider that. When you think you've exhausted tactic possibilities, you should do the same with strategic moves for both you and your opponent. For these reasons, I break this order down into 1) offensive tactical considerations, 2) defensive tactical considerations, and 3) strategic considerations. Of course, any of these will have to be weighed differently based on seriousness but that's the order I think is best to begin your considerations. 

1) Offensive tactical considerations

CC&T = Checks, Captures, and Threats. See if you have any valuable checks, and then scan the board for captures that can lead somewhere. Lastly look at your threats. For threats, I often find myself checking over all the tactical elements I can find in the position to help identify the critical parts of the board. If you see anything of potential value, start calculating but always remember that the board is changing as you're calculating so you must remember the other things in my list: tactics that your opponent might have in the course of your calculated lines, and strategic goals you might accomplish or strategic concessions you might have to give up in the lines you're considering.

2) Opponent's tactical considerations

Remember tactics are a two-way street so you should always be thinking what forcing moves your opponent might have. So this section is simply checking for CC&T that they might have available.

You can go a long way if you have these two steps automated: constantly surveying the board for CC&T both you and your opponent might have available. 

3) Strategic considerations

This is where it gets far more broad and less concrete. Overall, the pertinent questions I'm trying to get automated into my thinking process are from Aagard: 1) Where are the weaknesses? 2) What is my opponent's plan? 3) What is the worse placed piece? 

It's harder to break these down into specific offensive and defensive as they all run together but anyway it's best if you can always be thinking of these three things from both your perspective and your opponent's: Where are the weaknesses of both my position and my opponent's? What should the plans be from both sides? What are the worst placed pieces?

Conclusion

Short and sweet, but that's it. And even strategic principles come into play when you're thinking tactically! So essentially it's 1) Do I have any CC&T? 2) Does my opponent have any CC&T I need to defend against? then 3) What are the important strategic concepts in the position? (i.e. there's nothing immediate to take advantage of that you've seen, so you start asking Aagard's three questions regarding weaknesses, plans, and worst place pieces). As you look at all these factors, you should be constantly weighing which one takes precedence based on danger.

This is a lot and not something you can do on every move. My goal is to try to build these into my sub-conscious as I've tried to do with basic pattern recognition by studying very simple tactics books. For the ideas in this post, the book I'm using is Ray Cheng's Practical Chess Exercises: 600 lessons from Tactics to Strategy. As the subtitle says, there are a lot of tactics in that book but also a good amount of strategic and defensive moves. I've worked through 100 exercises and I really like it so far. I've been trying to approach each exercise using the thinking process outlined in this post. As usual, I'm using some spaced repetition methods so I can hopefully automate a way for my mind to quickly find the most pressing issue relatively quickly in the position.