Music Practice Tips

Today’s post is a modification of one written by Leo Babauta of Zen Habits, and was originally posted on ScottHYoung.com. With the permission of Leo, I have modified his post to relate to our music practice. Procrastination is something that can afflict many of us, and hopefully some of these techniques will help you overcome this problem, or at the very least, become productive procrastinators.

Leo opens with a great warning, that I’ll take verbatim.

Please note that I do not suggest that you do all of these — that’s an overwhelming task that would certainly be pushed back endlessly. Instead, choose one and try it. It will probably work for a little while. Then, when it stops working, choose another, and give that a go. With a palate of great procrastination hacks, you can never go wrong. And often, a combination of these will work fantastically.

1. Form a Do It Now Habit

Procrastination is basically just a bad habit. The best way to deal with bad habits is to replace it with a good habit - the Do It Now (DIN) habit. It takes about 30 days to create a new habit, so this process will require concentrated effort for 30 days, but the results are worth it. Place reminders around the place - a sticky note on top of your computer saying “Do it now” might work. I had an A4 page which I had attached to my monitor so that it would cover the screen which said “Have you done your practice yet? Just *** Do it!” - which would be a strong visual reminder for me to do my practice now. Every time you feel like procrastinating, you look at the sign and get on with your practice.

2. Do Your MIT First

MIT stands for Most Important Task, and will come from the planning sessions that I’m sure you’re all doing. If you teacher has asked you to learn the first movement of your concerto for the next lesson, then that’s probably going to be your most important task for the week. You’ll then have broken it down into days, and you’ll know where you stand. If you complete your MIT first each day, you’ll already have felt like you’ve achieved something.

3. The 10 Minute Rule

You teacher has just asked you to increase your practice time from 30 minutes to 1 hour? It might seem like a big hurdle, and that might put you off practicing completely. Instead, tell yourself that you’re going to practice for 10 minutes - there’s nothing intimidating about that. You’ll probably find that you get lost in the practice, and end up doing more than 10 minutes.

4. Break it down

I don’t mean start dancing. Break your tasks down into manageable pieces that can be done in a minute or two. Got to learn a whole sonata? Well, obviously, break it down into movements, but no, smaller. Rehearsal marks? Smaller still. Phrases? Getting there. How about a bar? Can you perfect one bar? One bar is easy. You could probably memorise one bar in one minute. Excellent, there’s a start. So what if there’s 400 bars, you’re not caring about that at the moment. All you care about is that one bar. Once that’s done, move onto the next bar. You’ll probably find that each bar won’t take one minute, while others might take a little longer. But it’s a bite sized piece that’s easy to digest. If you leave your instrument out all the time, then if you’ve got a spare minute before heading off to school - easy, let’s practice the next bar. You’ll find you get a feeling of success, and want to move onto the next tiny task. Eventually, you’ll be practicing - and that’s not procrastinating!

5. Love your work

One of the best things about pursuing music as a career is that I know I’ll be doing something I love. However, often you might find it difficult to understand what you love about the current piece you’re learning. Etudes and Scales are easy not to love. In this situation, you need to have something in mind that helps you realise that they are a necessary part of our lives, and we may as well learn to love them. For me, I listen to the Beethoven Violin Concerto, because so much of it is scalar, that it’s obvious to see that scales will help with learning that piece.

6. 30-10

This is one of Leo’s favourites, and I must agree and have mentioned it in a different way before. The idea behind this is to have a kitchen timer (or other sort of timer) and set it to 30 minutes. You work solidly, hard and fast, for 30 minutes, not even looking at the clock - just rely on the timer. Then once the timer goes off, set it again for 10 minutes, and allow yourself the time to do whatever else you want to do. It might be go and grabbing a coffee, or possibly checking your e-mails, myspace etc. Once that 10 minutes is up, back to work again - set it for 30 minutes, and work hard again. The beauty in this is that you know that every half an hour, you’ve got a break, you’ll have time to do the things that you’d want to do if you were procrastinating. The trick is not to get into anything that’s too heavy - that is, don’t start doing something that you know will take longer than 10 minutes. Making a cup of coffee is fine. Checking your e-mails is fine. Starting to cook a roast dinner, probably isn’t the best idea.

7. Set a deadline

It’s amazing how much of an effect deadlines can have on people. Perhaps it’s the name - I’ll be dead if I don’t get this done on time. Having a deadline will focus your practice, and know that you’ve got to have something done by a certain point in time. You can also plan your progress (if You’re the planning type) so that you’re not overworked, and you can actually get it done before the deadline. Others will just leave it until the last moment - try not to get into the habit of doing that, as your life will be more stressed, and will actually work against you. Instead, try the following. If your teacher sets you a task of having something prepared by the next lesson, which for example is on Wednesday, set yourself a deadline of having it done by Sunday. That way, even if it’s not done by Sunday, you don’t have to stress because you’ve got a couple of days left. And if you do have it ready by Sunday, you can then add to it, and surpass your teachers expectations.

8. Put Public Pressure on yourself

Of course, if you’re studying with a teacher, there is always a form of public pressure in the sense that they will check it at the next lesson. However, you might like to get some other form of public pressure. Try asking your parents to help out. Tell them after your lesson that You’ve got to have this page learnt by the next lesson, so ask if they could come and check how it’s going on Sunday. If they make a point of coming to check that you’ve learnt it by Sunday, and you know that they’re coming, then you’ll be more likely to work on it. Another option is to find a practice partner - someone who you can ask to put pressure on you, and at the same time, you can help by being pressure for them. The best thing about a practice partner is that they know about music too (have possibly learnt the same piece, or are learning the same piece, or just know enough to be able to give you feed back), so they’ll probably place a bit more pressure on you than a non-musical parent.

9. Reward Yourself

All work and no play makes Ben a boring boy. You need to make sure that you’re not over-working yourself, and you leave time for the important things. Make these things rewards - you can’t have it until… In the WASO 2008 brochure, they have a great quote from Margaret (Violin) and Mary-Anne (Flute) Blades, sisters in WASO.

“We owe our success to Mum, she would never let us watch ABC’s Countdown unless we had done our practice.”

Watching TV is a great one, another reward could be reading a book, or going for a run, or even having a biscuit with your coffee.
You can also set goals for larger tasks. For example, if you set yourself a goal of memorising a whole Concerto, you might also set yourself a reward of going out to play a round of golf, or purchasing a new CD, or buying tickets to a concert. That way you have something to look forward to, and an incentive to get on and do it - the sooner you get it done, the sooner you get the reward.

10. Consider not doing it

Now Leo’s original one doesn’t really fit well with music. His idea was that if you really regret doing something, it might not be worth doing it. It might not be necessary. That’s not really an option for musicians, so I’ll suggest something else, with the same theme.

Consider, if you will, not doing music at all. Would life be different if I didn’t do music? Almost certainly. Would life be worth living if I didn’t do music? Probably, but it wouldn’t be anywhere near as good. Despite all the hard work that music requires, there is something that keeps me here, a desire to create beautiful sounds, to move people with music. When I think about that, it’s easy to want to get practicing.

11. Change to an “abundance mentality”

Instead of thinking “aww, this is too hard, I’ll never be able to do this, this is going to take me weeks of practice to get it done” and other negative thoughts, think instead of positive ones. Think about the opportunities that will open up for you when you succeed. Think about all the fantastic pieces you’ll be able to play once you sort out that technical difficulty. By knowing the rewards and the opportunities, it will be hard to not want to practice.

12. Clear away the distractions

Shut down the computer, turn the radio off, put your phone on silent, practice away from where the family is playing games. Remove all the distractions that will prevent you from practicing. They don’t need to be away all the time, but when you’re practicing, make sure that that’s all your mind is going to focus on, and not be distracted by something else close by.

13. (10+2)*5

Similar to the 30+10 hack, this one is favoured by Merlin Mann of 43 Folders. The trick is to do your work in blocks of 10 minutes, and then take a 2 minute break. The 10 minute work blocks are highly focussed blocks of intensive work. You then take a 2 minute break, and then move onto either more of the same, or something else. Repeat this 5 times, and you’ve taken up a whole hour. A suggestion of how you might break up this hour

1. 10 Minutes on scales
2. 10 minutes on an etude
3. 10 minutes on a work for next lesson
4. 10 minutes on a technical issue - Violinists could do an excercise or 3 from Simon Fischer’s Basics
5. 10 minutes revising a piece in your repertoire

You’ve just done work on quite a number of things, all of which will help your playing and help prepare you for your lesson.

14. Procrastination Dash

A short burst of intense work - as little as a minute long - designed to get you out of procrastination mode. Tell yourself that you’ll get that bar right. It’s just enough to get the appetite going and make you want to practice more.

15. Track your time

Shock yourself, and see how much time you spend doing what. Keep a journal and take note of how much time you spent doing things during a day. 6 hours practice a day seems a lot to people, but they forget that there’s 24 hours in a day. Take away another 8 for sleep, and that still leaves you with 10 hours to do other things. Plenty of time.

16. Prepare yourself

Practice is much easier done when everything is ready. Take a little bit of time to organise your practice. Make some notes in your practice journal. Get all the music you want to work on today and put it in a pile. Pull the top one off and work on that for a bit, then place it at the bottom of the pile and work on the next thing. Make sure all your accessories for your instrument are available, should you need them. Ensure your metronome and tuner (if used) are close at hand. Make sure that everything you could possibly need for your practice is within reach so that you don’t need to go searching for them.

17. Overcome your fears

Often we’re scared of practicing, for whatever reason. Identify your fears, and then ask yourself rationally, “What’s the worst thing that could possibly happen?” Usually, you’ll find that it’s not so bad. If you give yourself time to identify your fears, you’ll often also find that they’re not so bad, and you’ll often also find ways of overcoming them.

18. Get a task-master

Enlist the help of someone to make sure that you do your work. Get them to push you, to make sure that you practice. This can be a friend, family member, co-worker, whatever. Just make sure that they’re not a procrastinator as well.

19. Schedule it last minute

Again, While this tip may work for some things such as working on an assignment, or likewise, it’s not great for music, as music is something that has to be practiced regularly. Last minute practice doesn’t yield results. I’m not even going to try and change this one - just don’t do it with your practice.

20. Structured Procrastination

An interesting idea, and I’m not sure how it would relate to our practice. If anyone gives this a go, I’d love to hear how it works. The basic idea is that you put your most pressing goal (but one whose deadline can be pushed back a bit) at the top of the list, and then work down to your least pressing. What happens is that when you get bored of your most pressing item, you can procrastinate by doing the next item on the list. When you get a new goal, that goes at the top of the list, making your previous goal now a procrastination item. Eventually, everything gets worked on and your “procrastination” actually ends up being quite fruitful work.

Bonus: Procrascipline

Leo says that a good list isn’t a good list without a bonus item. Just as well, because Item 19 didn’t relate to music at all, so this still makes 20 Music related procrastination hacks. I’m just going to finish it off verbatim.

From the Slacker Manager, the first rule of procrascipline is that you cannot ignore the task. The second rule is that you must put it on a list that you actually look at throughout the day. The third rule is that you must communicate your progress to others — whether you’ve actually made any progress or not (and if not, why not). These three rules actually work. Don’t procrastinate in doing the third step, though.

Right, well, now that that’s done, I’m off to practice. I’m giving the (10+2)*5 a go this week. Happy Practicing!