How to Practice: Creating a Routine that Works for You

    Have you ever found times when you struggled to find time to practice? It’s almost as if there aren’t enough hours in a day to allow for productive practice with your instrument as we experience problems of overcommitment, fatigue, and lack of motivation. While in an ideal world, we want to have endless hours a day to practice achieving a high level of musicianship, we must make the most of the hours that are given us. 
    A lot of the time, we are under the impression that we must just keep repeating the same passage repeatedly until we get it right. While repetition is very useful, unless you understand what the problem is, this continuous repetition is unproductive and can lead to injuries like tendinitis. Here are a couple of things to be tips to be mindful of when you practice: 

1. Understand the problem. If you don’t understand the problem, you won’t be able to fix it. If you’re able to isolate the problem and be able to address it directly, it is a lot more efficient and will save you a lot of time. 
2. Be realistic. If you have a full day of classes, in addition to sports and other enrichment activities, do you really think you’ll be able to have enough concentration to work efficiently? What’s useful is being able to schedule a block of time during your day when you can be concentrated. You can start with a 15-minute block of time and build from there. When we practice music, it involves a high level of concentration when you are alert.  
3. Set goals. This is probably something that we’ve heard many times, which also ties in with being realistic. While we want to be ambitious and set high goals for ourselves, we also must be able to balance that with the time that we do have. I always found it useful to make a list of long-term goals of what I want to accomplish with the instrument, but also being able to set immediate goals of what I want to achieve in my individual practice that are realistic within the timeframe I must work. ​

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