Thursday, July 5, 2007

Quitting in the third circle

In my previous attempts to complete a seven circles of tactics exercise, I've almost always stopped somewhere in the third circle.

I think the biggest problem comes there for a couple of reasons:
  1. By the third circle, you really don't have enough of them memorized to go quickly. You're still having to manually search, find and check your solution.
  2. I normally spend between 30 and 60 minutes a day doing tactics, which means the first circle is good, the second circle tends to go over the hour, and the third circle is rarely finished before 90 minutes.
The combination of the two, means that by the third circle I give up.

In future seven circles exercises (including this one) I'll have to be pretty conservative with the number of puzzles I try to do per day - especially in the early circles - because by the third circle you don't want it to get so difficult that you feel like quitting.

Anyhow - I'm about halfway through my second circle of Lou Hays' book and I'm already having concerns about the time it takes.

Here's hoping.

1 comment:

Blue Devil Knight said...

I try to move fast enough that I'm getting at least ten more problems done per day than the previous circle, but not so fast that my performance is dropping. When I do that, I eventually pass a threshold and can start cranking them out.