Every time I read or type "Adult Chess Improver", I impulsively want to initialize it and say ACI and then I almost immediately hate it. ACI sounds like a part of my leg I don't wanna f*** up or some kind of insurance I'm supposed to get when I buy a house. I'll stick with adult chess improver.
I thought it'd be interesting to track how much time I spend on chess in a week, rounded off to fifteen minute increments. The week started off a bit lighter than usual because I haven't had quite the same motivation as I'd had on average over the last year but overall it's a pretty good spread and representative of what I'd consider a typical week.
I think I've been over this before, but I usually put chess work into one of two categories: active or passive. Examples of active chess study for this week included playing chess over-the-board (casual rapid games in a park), working through Yusupov's second book, working on memorizing my opening repertoire, and doing checkmate problems from Polgar's giant book. Passive "study" time included watching the FIDE Candidates Tournament, reading the introduction to a Hellsten book on Amazon's sneak peak page, and browsing /r/chess or twitter. It's still chess technically, but I'm not really stretching any muscles, if you will.
The Numbers
Here are my estimated times per day:
The week started on Sunday April 25th and ended at 11:59pm on the night of Saturday May 1. In this time span, I was able to spend 20.25 hours on chess. About 13.75 of that time was active chess study. Again, this was a relatively light week compared to some of the weeks I was working on the first book in Yusupov's series, for example. I'm able to get in chess study time while at work most weekdays and that's actually where most of my chess time is accumulated. On an average weekday, I'm able to spend 3.3 hours on chess--although some of that time is browsing online chess communities, or passively watching some chess content on youtube. (The 2.89 average hours per day in the chart below is taking into account the entire seven-day week, 3.3 hr/day is my average for Monday through Friday.) When I'm home, I'm doing fiancé stuff like planning a wedding, making dinner, and watching after our senior dog so I do not have quite as much time to get in as many chess games as I'd like.
Conclusion
I ended up with a touch over twenty hours:
For a rather light week, I think this is pretty good! I wish I included some more numbers in the summary chart. For instance, 13.75 hours of active study comes out to an average of almost 2 hours per day of performing active chess work (playing/analyzing games, calculating tactics, solving positions from books). And I multiplied my total weekly hours by 52 to conclude that I might spend around 1053 hours a year on chess. Which I think is great, and in a decade, I'd surpass the Gladwellian 10,000 hour mark (see Malcolm Gladwell, among others), whatever that might mean. However, I should probably only calculate my active chess hours for that metric. So 13.75 * 52 = 715 hours per year of active chess work. At that pace, It'd take me about 14 years to reach the 10,000 hour mark. Or, if you want to reach ~1000 hours of active chess work every year, then that would require about 19.25 hours a week. Well, this past week I spent 20.25 hours on chess so if I simply transform some passive chess "work" like youtube videos into harder chess study, I'd be very close! I hope this was interesting for some of you and it might inspire you to track your own chess habits.
Best of luck.
