Over the years, my playing interests have continually shifted. There have been times when I approached the game from an opening perspective (see Dieter's fuseki experiments), as do many amateurs because they know the opening makes a difference for pros, the opening is where you can apply intuition most and because some authors, like Kajiwara, urged us to emphasize the opening. There have been other times where I emphasized shape (see a static treatise on shape), as do many amateurs, because shape is a seemingly nifty way to get rid of the nuisance of reading. Also, I used to replay a lot of pro games, to get an instinctive feeling for the game. In short, I definitely used to substitute reading by set sequences and shapes. I am still unsure about the very nature of human learning. Is it biased towards imitation or towards logical reasoning?
A major change came when I read Killer of Go by Sakata Eio. It's a smashing book, making you eager to go and kill your opponent's groups. Suddenly, I didn't think the opening was so all deciding anymore: if you could read better than your opponent, there are always possibilities to kill groups. Also, it dawned upon me that doing tsumego is the key to reading ability.
In 2001, I had a friend living in my place (he was having his boat built in Ghent and needed a place to stay) and we played many serious games. We used a kadoban principle, stretching our abilities to the maximum. Afterwards I used to review and analyze my games. This is the time when I experienced most improvement. Since then, I keep the habit of review and analysis to discover mistakes.
In 2007 I started to play again on KGS. After some initial confusion and frustration with the heavy fighting that is typical of lower dan games, I seem to have regained my composure and won 8/9 to reach 2d again. Right now I am taking lessons with Minue.
Second half of 2007 - another break. Music is life (sic) again.
2008, I find myself watching KGS a lot and I don't like myself doing that. I guess I'm so caught up with developing the music band that I need some distraction once in a while.
At work, I had an enlightening moment. I realized I was applying that capital Go wisdom: if you know what is important, you can achieve a lot with surprisingly little effort.
In 2009 and 2010 I had a few eruptions of online play, but I fell in love with tun based play, notably on DGS. Playing at such a slow pace had a strong impact on my style, which I think also showed in my occasional returns to online play. I seem to emphasize thickness much more. When you have all the time in the world to calculate a complicated L&D problem (or even half cheatingly play them out), tactical ability does not matter anymore: what matters is the positional judgment. So, I tend to leave my groups less vulnerable to attack, since even slow thinking opponents may find a killing or at least harassing move, while I also (and consequently) let my opponent's moyo develop more freely, since I will have the time to find the proper invasion technique or the way to send his weak group into a direction which harms the moyo.
Funny how literally slow play leads to figuratively slow play.