Challenges

One of the biggest reasons we start to dread practice is that we see too little improvement despite spending so much time practicing. The dread becomes a huge motivational hurdle to even start a session.

Let’s discuss each problem in turn.

Motivation

It’s all too easy to despair about our lack of progress on the instrument (trust me, we’ve all been there).

It’s important to find as many ways as possible to make practice as easy and pleasurable as possible. This includes making where you practice as pleasant as possible: bright, clutter free, and someplace you want to be.

It’s totally legit to bribe yourself with new toys, too: new guitars/pedals/amp/software (or simply new strings). Anything that makes you want to pick up the guitar is good (just try to at least recognize when you are playing with new toys more than actually practicing).

If you feel yourself starting to dread practice, please apply some of the strategies described in the next section.

Time

The other huge impediment to quality practice, of course, is time, or, more specifically, lack of it. None of us, rich or poor, working or retired, get more than 24 hours in a day, and we all have things other than guitar competing for that time.

How much time?

My advice is to set realistic expectations out the gate. It’s easy to set yourself up for failure with an aggressive time goal. Few things are as demotivating as feeling “I’m so far behind”.

Behind what? Remember that at one point you couldn’t play at all. You’re almost always the only one setting expectations on yourself: it pays to make them easily achievable.

Not everyone has an hour or more per day to dedicate to the guitar. Fewer still can remain motivated while spending that much time with the instrument.

On the other hand, you’re unlikely to make significant progress if you only dedicate, say, an hour or two every third weekend. Regular, near-daily practice is by far the most efficient way to improve.

The more time you can dedicate each day, of course, the faster your progress will be, but even five minutes a day three or four times a week (hopefully with longer periods every other weekend or so) is more than sufficient.

Five minutes a day, three days a week is roughly a bazillion times better than thirty minutes every other weekend. (Those must be five by-the-clock, focused, efficient, dedicated, distraction-free minutes each day, though!)

Time of day

Divide your typical day into three segments: morning, mid-day, evening. Ask yourself two questions:

1. Realistically, which of these segments is more often available for me to practice?

2. In the absence of any other constraints, which segment would I prefer to use for practice?

Ignore weekdays vs. weekends for the moment.

We’re all different. Some have more energy in the mornings, others at night. Try to at least be aware of when you’d prefer to practice.

If other constraints make it impossible to practice during your preferred segment, realize that any practice is better than no practice.

Next, spend a moment to think of any specific action you make almost every single day during the time segment you choose.

Maybe it’s making a cup of coffee. Maybe it’s placing your car-keys in a tray or or on a hook. Maybe it’s washing the dishes after dinner. Ideally, it’s something you do almost every single day.

Try to find something where you can afford to spend an extra minute or two on the task.

That’s your trigger.

We are not going to associate the trigger with a full practice session. That’s way too big and too much effort.

Instead, we’ll associate it with the very first step of practice: reviewing your focus list.

In my case, my trigger is retrieving my first cup of coffee from the coffee maker.

Every time I make coffee in the morning (my preferred segment) I retrieve my Zettelkasten and review my focus list while I enjoy the coffee.

That typically leads to at least a few minutes of practice. But it doesn’t matter whether I practice or not. All that matters is that I physically pick up my ring of index cards like Pavlov’s dog whenever I start making coffee.

Seriously: I can’t fill the coffee maker any more without at least thinking about guitar.

It’s a stupid pet trick, but it works.

The squishy nature of time

I’m going to introduce two magic tools in this section.

Earlier, I recommended “even five minutes” of practice per day. You may think “five minutes” sounds too short to accomplish anything useful.

Far from it. In fact, five minutes can seem tortuously long: I frequently practice individual exercises for even shorter intervals (three minutes is my preferred interval for many exercises).

But short practice sessions require 100% focus. Each interval must be focused, active time with no distractions, snacking, or email.

Kitchen timer

The most effective way I know to accomplish this is with the first magic tool: a kitchen timer.

Just looking at a wall clock doesn’t work. The timer on your smartphone will work in a pinch, but I recommend an inexpensive kitchen timer.

Decide on the drill or exercise you’re going to perform, set the timer for three minutes, and go. You’ll swear the bell must be broken sometimes! Three minutes can be an unbelievably long time.

I try to get in at least 20 minutes of practice most days. Some days I only have enough time for a single 3-5 minute exercise. Other days I have time for three or four 3-minute sprints, plus time for planning my next practice sessions.

Even on days where I have an hour or more to dedicate, I tend to break things into twenty minute sections with breaks in between.

Seriously, an awful lot can be accomplished with just one three-minute drill a day for three or more days per week.

Metronome

The other more magic tool to control time is a metronome.

A metronome has at least three different uses:

• Most commonly, it’s useful for building speed. You start practicing something at a slow tempo, then gradually increase the tempo when you can play through the exercise without mistakes.

• It’s useful to subdivide a beat and feel a groove. Basically, you can use a metronome as a standby for an actual drummer (one that never gets bored).

• It’s the ultimate test proctor (and reality check). You may think you’ve learned a lick, chord sequence, or whatever, and can play it well, but there is nothing like a metronome to prove just how wrong you are.

It’s the last one that I’d like to focus on here, especially in conjunction with a kitchen timer.

Let’s say you’re an absolute beginner, still struggling to switch between G, C, and D chords in open position: A great way to practice is to set the timer for three minutes, the metronome to a slow tempo (say 60 BPM) and practice switching chords every fourth beat.

As it gets easier from session to session, day to day, try every third beat, every second beat, or every beat. Finally, start increasing the tempo.

This works for almost any exercise.

Those beats just don’t stop! It’s hard (and exhausting) to play something you’ve not yet completely mastered in time. Believe me: three minutes can seem an eternity with this sort of exercise.

It can be unbelievably satisfying, though, when you finally complete an exercise without missing a beat, even if only for three minutes at a time!

Removing impediments

Practice is a sort of mini-war: everything is constantly trying it’s damnedest to keep you from practicing.

Your job is to eliminate every possible excuse and impediment.

Starting a practice session needs to be falling-off-a-log easy. The ideal is to make it easier to practice than not. Anything that might create the slightest impediment needs to go.

Examples of this kind of thinking:

• Keep your guitar out of its case on a stand or hanging on the wall.

• Maintain a dedicated practice area (just a corner of a room suffices) with everything you need out and ready to use: stool, guitar, timer, metronome, notebook, tripod, computer/tablet, etc.

• Pre-cable and configure everything so that a single “on” switch will power everything up and leave you ready to go.

You’re a million times less likely to even start a practice session If you need to unpack anything, flip more than one switch, plug in more than one cable, or if you need to root around to find a pen and paper to write on.

It’s way too easy to blow off a practice session for the silliest little impediment!

One caution: while I do recommend keeping a computer or tablet nearby, beware of the distractions they can become. In particular, if there is any way to turn off notifications and alerts during your practice session, do so.

Fight the desire to surf the web or check email — that’s not practice!

Bite-sized chunks

We engineers tend to be a bit obsessive. Once we set ourselves to a task, we focus on it almost to the exclusion of everything else. Worse, we tend to set absurdly over-aggressive goals.

Without actually saying out loud or writing it down, we’ll think something as silly as:

“I want to learn to play [some song]. I’ll keep practicing until it sounds exactly like the record.”

Then we’ll mono-maniacally practice that and only that for the next several days, weeks, or months until we succeed or (more likely) are ready to give up the instrument.

Baby steps prove to be about a million times more motivating. Instead of setting the bar at mastering an entire song as well as a professional (!!) how about:

• Identify the various sections of the song (intro, verses, choruses, outro, etc.).

• Figure out what key the song is in.

• Learn the guitar riff in bars six and seven.

• etc.

The trick is to make each “chunk” manageable but measurable. Nothing is as motivating as seeing measurable progress. (Conversely, nothing is as demotivating as seeing little to no progress on an “impossible” goal.)

Break “impossible” things down into smaller things you know you can accomplish!

Squirrel!

Distractions are a common problem.

These days, the internet makes it even worse: between online videos, ebooks, websites, apps, remote-learning, etc., there are now so many great sources of (often free) music education that you can literally waste hours just bouncing from topic to topic and instructor to instructor.

I don’t know about you, but my practice sessions are doomed if I even touch a keyboard!

Your phone is almost as bad (though there are so many useful apps it’s hard to avoid them altogether).

The problem is almost as bad between practice sessions. I come across fascinating new lessons, exercises, backing tracks, etc. almost daily! I used to make a note somewhere (often just adding it to my “watch later” queue) and tell myself I’d get to it eventually.

Then when it came time to sit down and practice, I’d forget what I wanted to practice! I’d spend minutes or even hours searching through notes and watching videos until something interested me enough to actually start practicing.

How to avoid becoming overwhelmed like this?