Three months playing chess - a look back

It's now three months ago that I started playing chess. Looking back, what would I do differently if I had the chance of going back in time? And what are the things that worked well?

The most important thing that I did wrong is wasting time. With a job and some social life there is always too less time for chess. I definitely spent way too much time surfing the internet to look for "the" way to learn chess. First of all, there is no single best way to learn a game as complex as this. Aside from that, reading articles on how to improve does not get you any better - only practice does. Therefore, I should have spend more time studying and playing. But of course it is much more stressful to solve tactics puzzles than to consume other people's thoughts (This applies also to blogging, so I should stop this and go back to studying tactics. And, yes, if anyone reads this: you'd better study or play a game, too).

The improvement I enjoy most did not come through solving tactics puzzles, though. In contrast to the very beginnings, I have now a plan for almost every move I play. However, most of these ideas don't work out as planned, or, even worse, backfire. For instance, I just captured a lone pawn with my queen in one of my correspondence chess games with the plan to go on exchanging queens two moves later. The outcome: now I do know why one shouldn't chase pawns with the queen... I think most of my progress in coming up with plans is due to playing through Irving Chernev's wonderfully annotated game collection "Logical chess: move by move". Not getting lost while calculating moves, however, will require more experience and of course studying tactics, tactics, tactics!