You don’t need to practice everything

Continuing off of yesterday’s post about forming good habits I wanted to make a post about an approach to practice that I’ve been adopting more recently.

I’ve been focusing on different things depending on what day I’m practicing. I’ll focus on one technique on day, and the next time I practice I’ll focus on a different technique.

This has been helpful recently especially because I don’t have the same amount of practice time I used to have so I can’t practice as much as I used to be able to.

So I can’t focus on everything I’d want to in one practice session. If I tried to I’d spend maybe 5 minutes on some things, and that just isn’t enough time to make any progress.

Separate things into days

As an example on guitar I might focus on alternate picking on one day, sweep picking on another day, vibrato on a different day, and rhythm guitar playing on yet another day.

I’ll do the same with different theory ideas. I’ll practice arpeggios and scales on different days. I might even separate that into practicing one specific group of scales like pentatonic scales on one day and then major scales and those modes on a different day.

This approach allows you to dedicate enough time to specific techniques and improve those techniques, while also allowing you to not need long practice sessions.

Ideally, yes, you’d be able to practice everything in every practice session, regularly. But if you don’t have time to do that then this approach can be incredibly useful to use. It’ll allow you to make progress, even if it is over a shortened time frame.

Look at weekly practice

Another way to think about this same idea is to look at your practice habits over the course of a week. If you can only practice for a few days a week, take a look at the total amount of things you practice during that entire week. Rather than looking at single days, take a look at how much you work on in a week.

This can allow you to have a little bit more flexibility.

If on one day you only practiced scales, arpeggios, and modes, maybe the next practice session you work on a few pieces of technique. Then after that you work on ear training.

This means that over the course of the entire week you’ve worked on a number of different things; scales, modes, arpeggios, technique, and ear training. So you’re looking at things from an elongated time frame.

Final notes

The better you get at your instrument, the slower progress will be. At the beginning you may see large improvements right away, but as you get better it takes more work and more time to improve even more.

This also means that 5 minutes of practice won’t be enough to improve certain things. Eventually 10 or even 15 minutes won’t be enough. Unless you get incredibly specific with what you’re working on for those 15 minutes, you eventually won’t be able to make a whole lot of progress just practicing for that little amount of time.

This means you either need to increase the amount of time you’re practicing for, or practice specific skills for that amount of time. If you have a limited amount of time to practice then you’ll need to choose specific skills to practice.

I hope this post has been useful.

ISJ