A single put is both a price play and a volatility play, while a put spread is more of a price play.

Yeah, all that Greek stuff is hard.

Despite making my living primarily from options of one kind or another, I simplify things a whole lot: With very few exceptions I just assume all my positions are held to expiry, and ignore the interim. The time value is extremely easy to estimate in that situation!

If I *observe* time value moving in my favour (or against) for an existing position I'll occasional do an opportunistic trade, but I don't think about that when deciding on opening a position.

One of the few exceptions is when I buy "disaster puts". Time value spikes during disasters, and that's when you want to sell them, so having puts with lots of time value in them (long dated) is sometimes good. Disaster puts generally lose money, so you want to have a bit of a "time value" tailwind to reduce the pain.

Jim