So….. I was teaching a student a few weeks ago.
An adult student. She takes guitar lessons from me.
She’s one of my favorite students!
But something caught my eye during our lesson. I knew that she kept track of each time she practiced guitar… but I never really understood the true intensity and insanity of it!!
Here’s what her practice log looks like:
I love it!!
So old school. No apps. No spreadsheets. Just a good old fashioned notebook.
So what is this… and how can you do it too?
Step One: Grab an old notebook.
Step Two: Make a grid.
On the left side of the page, write down the songs (or whatever) you’re working on. On the top of the page make a date range
Step Three (the hard part) Mark down/color in each thing that you practice on each corresponding day.
My student color codes the days we have lessons (highlighted in yellow).
That’s it! It’s manual tracking at it’s finest.
Oh – and she does this for piano lessons, workouts, and any other work/life goals she has.
Why I love this:
1. It serves as a tracking log. Well obviously. But it’s important. It’s important to see what you’ve done. It gives you a no-nonsense concrete idea of what you have been working on (and what you’ve been slacking off on).
2. It’s motivating. When she sees that she’s missed a day of practice, she’s all the more motivated to practice more. When she sees she’s missed multiple practice days, she knows it’s time to really hunker down.
3. It gives you excellent insights. When I meet with her to have a lesson, she’ll tell me right off the bat that she hasn’t been practicing, and her progress isn’t as strong. She has honest documentation of her practice time, and she can see why she’s not progressing.
4. It shows her weaknesses and strong points. I love that she documents WHICH SONGS SHE PRACTICES. This was revelatory to me. Usually I give my students one, maybe two songs to work on each week. She has 20 songs. It serves as a reminder of what songs she CAN play (or HAS played in the past).
She can always go back and review to make sure she can still play them well – and if she can’t – she can dust them off and add them to her practice regimen.
That’s it.
Is it a little crazy? Yes
Is it effective? Yes.
Do I approve? Oh yes!
Should you do the same? Yeah – why not?
If you’ve hit a plateau, start documenting your playing/practicing – see where you’re weak points are, then address them. Go grab a notebook and get to work!!