Time management and Malaysian time

To me mastery of chess encompasses 4 elements. One is understanding yourself, the second is understanding your opponent, the third is time management and finally the board.

Time management

As some of you know, I do business on the internet and I deal primarily with Americans and we charge by the hour. What does that mean? In our case that meant we had to learn to look at a piece of work and estimate how much time that work will take to do. That requires development and refinement of judgement. We started by looking at pieces of work that others were doing and what they were charging for the time taken and then putting ourselves through the same test. We timed ourselves. And we did that until we could perform the same task, at the same quality as the global market. And then we went one step further. We tried to do it more efficiently, more effectively. See eMasters

We even did that to our sub contractors. We evaluate them not only by their hourly rates and turn around time but also by the amount of time they spend using up our time; whether there are unnecessary wastage of our time from careless mistakes, whether they communicate in a timely manner.

This value of time, our time and other people's time is a cultivated habit. So if you have one week to complete the project you have to hustle. If you have one day, you hustle even faster but without making a mistake.

Does this sound familiar? This is chess. How many games are lost because of time trouble? How do we learn this habit to the level to produce that GM?

The time given to every player is the same all over the world, and to get that GM we have to compete in the global arena and they won't let us play Malaysian time. You can't not value time in every other area of your life and master time on the chess board.