Reddit reviews How Life Imitates Chess

I might be able to offer some sentiments on this topic.

My process is like this: You sit down with a pen a nice blank piece of paper. You then stare at the paper until a thought of a practical nature pops into your mind. You write this thought down. Then you wait for a new one to pop in. These waits can be a good moment to meditate. When you get the feeling that no more thoughts about practical matters will pop into your head, you examine what you've written down. When you have gotten some idea about the content of the different thoughts, you re-write them into the task needed to fulfill them. You can rearrange these tasks in a way that fits your personal method of thinking. You can re-order them by category, by importance, by which order you are going to complete them or by any other method you deem worthy. I, for instance, spend some time dividing the tasks into boxes that cover different categories, and in the individual boxes I list them by importance. I then draw small icons to each box, so that finances will get a dollar bill, while laundry gets a pair of trousers. I do this because it makes it easier for me to have an overview of the whole list. It is simply a quirk of my personal way of thinking that I've tried to incorporate into the list.

This sheet of paper will be the foundational tool of your plan. It acts as external memory and "frees up ram" in your conscious mind, which is a very pleasant feeling indeed.

You can expand on the list by writing down small notes to your thoughts about different tasks or by your overall reaction to the practical shades of your existence. This can help you uncover defects in your approach or indeed whole new ways to solve problems.

It can be good to know the difference between strategy and tactics when thinking about planning. Strategy is the overall plan which is made out of a long set of tactics. So your strategy might be to eliminate stress in your life and free your mind of recurring thoughts about practical matters, so as to have better use of your mental faculties. The list and the various ways you deal with the individual tasks are tactics and these should be constructed in a way that conforms with the strategy, so that there will be a synergy betwixt all the tactics that then drives the strategy. I usually picture a pile of grain. Each grain is a tactic and the collected pile is the strategy.

I had good reasons to want to eliminate stress in my life, so I worked on understanding what would stress me and I then made sure that the different tactics I used to reduce the overall burden of practicalities where each of a non-stressful nature (so that they were aligned, so to speak, with the strategy).

Similar methods can be used to deal with different problems.

Quite a lot of science and study has been done on this, and I can recommend looking into game-theory if one is interested in such matters. If one is more interested in a more general non-academic read, then I can recommend How Life Imitates Chess by Garry Kasparov (universally hailed as the best chessplayer in the history of the game). In there he explains a lot about what chess has taught him about the decision-making process and how it can be applied in different everyday scenarios.