Create a practice routine you can actually stick to.
I’ll be straight with you: practice isn’t exactly the most fun you can have on a Saturday night.
I love the effects of practice, but practice itself is hard work. It takes a lot of concentration and a lot of energy. That’s why mastery of any creative art is so rare — because it requires so much energy.
Many people dig into the craft with great excitement, but soon realize how much work is involved in getting good. Soon enough, they decide maybe the craft isn’t so exciting after all, and they find something else to do with their time.
Others, however, understand the work involved, and want to do the work, but have a hard time getting started—or have a hard time getting started again after they’ve fallen off the wagon.
With that in mind, here are a few ideas for breaking up your practice routine, preventing it from becoming too terribly dull, and making it feel like a little more fun and manageable.
1. Bribe Yourself
Give yourself a reward at the end of each practice session. End each session with something fun or exciting or otherwise cheerful. It can be directly related to the music (a song you love to play) or it can be some kind of healthy bribe like a few squares of dark chocolate or some pleasure reading.
Another good habit is to write in your practice journal about what you’ve accomplished today. Give yourself a pat on the back for showing up and doing some work. Celebrate the small victories.
I’ll tell you, I am not above bribing myself and using any psychological trick I can to get myself to form positive associations with practice time. I’ve bribed myself with olives, books, and beach days. I think you’ll find these kinds of bribes are invaluable for bargaining with yourself on those days when you just don’t feel like doing the work: “Okay, if I practice scales for twenty minutes, I can have one cookie!”
2. Ask Why.
It’s only natural that you’re not going to feel motivated to practice unless you understand why you’re studying what you’re studying. If a music theory book just gives you the harmonic minor scale and says “Memorize this in every key,” it’s asking you to do a lot of work. And it’s not making clear why you would ever want to memorize the harmonic minor, and it’s not making clear how you’d ever actually use this knowledge.
Unfortunately, many music theory books do fail to let you know why and when each concept will be useful to you. And I think authors do you a disservice when they approach things that way, because nobody on this planet wants to spend her limited time and energy on what feels like dry, purposeless busywork. As we discussed in an earlier lesson, goals are inspiring. Connecting dry work to exciting goals gets us through.
So a totally appropriate question to ask at any time is: “What’s in it for me?” or “Why should I care about this?” any good teacher should be able to answer that question for you and give you some idea of what you’ll be able to do with the knowledge once you’ve learned it.
3. Keep your sessions reasonable.
The goal of practice isn’t to spend as much butt-in-chair time as possible! The goal is to maintain intense focus on whatever you’re practicing. If you can only maintain intense focus for 10, 15, or 20 minutes, that’s how long your practice sessions should be. One you start feeling restless and mentally tired, go take a break. Do something else.
Eventually, your windows of focus will lengthen as your mind and your life stretch to accommodate them—but in the meantime, long and restless sessions won’t do you any good. Go for short, intense, daily bursts of focus.
You can use a timer to make these practice sessions feel more manageable. Having a timer counting down in the background really helps you relax into the work. It’s reassuring to know that, no matter how tough practice is, you’ll get relief after X minutes and Y seconds have passed.
4. Leave yourself a bookmark for next time.
Before you end each practice session, jot a few quick notes in your practice journal about how things went today. Finally, end the session by leaving yourself a reminder about exactly where to begin when you sit down for your next session.
Leaving yourself an exact reminder of where to begin the next session is one of those seemingly small things that makes sitting down to practice much easier and more enjoyable. That way you can get right down to the work, without having to puzzle out where you left off last time.
Don’t Beat Yourself Up.
Here I’d like to offer a word of encouragement: to skip practice is human, and to find yourself resisting or dreading or procrastinating the work is also human. So if you miss a session, or even if you miss a week or more of sessions, it’s important that you don’t guilt yourself about it. And don’t punish yourself, either. Don’t double your practice time on a particular day to make up for a skipped session.
Forming a new habit is hard. It takes willpower and it demands a fair amount of your energy. You can safely expect that you’re going to slip at some point. Distractions happen. Low energy days happen. Damning yourself for these lapses isn’t going to help you perform any better, so please: Quit hitting yourself.
Instead, just notice when you’ve strayed. See if you can figure out what went wrong.
If you tempt yourself with a nice bribe; understand why you need to learn the material; keep your practice sessions reasonable and sustainable; and leave yourself a bookmark that makes sitting down to practice hassle-free…you’re giving yourself a much better fighting chance of creating a practice habit that you fulfill every day.
Refer back to this lesson anytime for ideas on how to renew your commitment and help you make practice a daily habit.