What went well
I am very happy with the total time I spent on playing and studying chess this week. In particular, I solved many tactics since I did that in the morning which worked well for me. Playing more rapid games is also a goal of mine which I managed to achieve in this first week.
What can be improved
In general, I enjoy jumping around a bit when studying chess but for this week, I tried to do too many different things. When I looked at my time breakdown I noticed that I only spent 15 minutes on Mastering Chess Strategy and 30 minutes on Chess Structures.
Another thing to improve is planning my rapid games. Since the length of a game varies, I found it hard to include it into my schedule and often played a game in the evening when I couldn't concentrate as much as I would have liked to.
Adjustments for next week
I will work with fewer books during each week in order to spend meaningful time on each book. For next week, I won't go through Chess Structures in order to solve more exercises from Mastering Chess Strategy.
I also want to prioritise my playing and play the games earlier in the day in order to be able to concentrate more on the games. In order to plan them better, I will include some buffer time for long games and if a game finishes earlier, I will use the time for analysis or tactics.
I will probably have less time for chess during the next week so I want to get the most out of each study session. An important step in achieving this will be planning my training sessions and elimination distractions during that time.
Interesting positions
I came across the following position from the game Mishra-van Foreest, 2023
White to play
White is a pawn down but black is underdeveloped so white has to act quickly to get his pieces into the attack: 29.d5! White wants to clear the d5-square for his knight 29...c5 30.d6! clearing the square for the knight. 30...Qxd6 31.Nd5 Rh6 32.Rd1 Re6 33.Qc2! +- White has a big advantage due to the attack on the black king.