Planning Your Weekly Practice Schedule
When it comes to practice, we often find it hard to seek the right motivations to persistently put the work into improving our guitar playing, let alone create a positive practice regime that interacts fluently with our schedule. Whilst one day’s practice could be brilliant, the next’s could be a negative, damaging experience, diminishing our confidence and dedication to our progression. We may even find ourselves at the mercy of a rut, leading to no desire to pick up the instrument at all. However, these things can be avoided with a bit of time management, self-reflection and conscientious positivity. It’s important to remember that it’s not about how many days a week we practice or how many hours we cram into one day but about creating consistent habits that build our confidence periodically. Creating short and long-term goals for your guitar playing is essential in enabling and maintaining your dedication to your practice and progress. Though, we must remember to be realistic, implementing only positive practice methods. Here are some valuable tips and tools to remember when creating a weekly practice schedule that works best for you.
1. Set Realistic Goals
Before building an effective weekly practice schedule, you must put your playing in the spotlight, scrutinising your strengths and weaknesses without bias. Doing so will allow you to see areas that require more attention than others, drawing your focus to what it is you know you need to improve right now. Being honest about your level as a guitar player will help you set your goals.
Short and long-term goals are fundamental to our progression as they allow us to map out how we can navigate our way to them and begin to visualise what we can realistically do given the time we have available to practice. For instance, if we know we can only practice a couple of nights per week for only a couple of hours, it would be irresponsible to set mastering Jazz improvisation as a short-term goal. This would be more suited to a long-term goal, enabling us to create smaller short-term goals as part of our daily practice schedule, contributing to a solid, positive week of practice. Building confidence and rewarding yourself for your small steps of progress are crucial ingredients to fuel your motivation and dedication, so don’t be too humble not to pat yourself on the back and be happy with your improvements.
Obviously, no set schedule will work for everyone: we must manage our time uniquely and according to our commitments. Though, it doesn’t matter if you have 2 or 7 days a week to practice. What matters is using the time positively and realistically, facilitating your development. However, if you want to increase your practice time or funnel your time into more productive habits, set out 1 hour, 3 days per week, dedicated to focused practice.
This empowers us to create our goals realistically and trace our progress periodically whilst being kind to ourselves, eliminating unnecessary stress. It’s all about keeping our practice on a positive course and avoiding any negative habits!
2. Time Management
Although it may seem like lazy work, 3 days is an ideal amount of time to seriously focus on improving your guitar playing. Of course, this doesn’t mean that we won’t or shouldn’t pick up the guitar the other 4 days out of the week - we can and should still have fun in our noodling universes. Yet, like most things, it’s all about balance. Time management is a vital element in creating a weekly schedule that we can stick to and see our growth in real-time. After all, how are we to get the most out of our practice if we can’t specify appropriate times to do so? Allocating 3 days creates a realistic, achievable foundation to point us in the right direction positively.
Time blocking and day blocking will be very useful tools in your quest to find the right practice balance for you. For instance, taking these 3 “super-focus” days allows for breaking up our weekly goals into daily goals. From here, we can use time blocks to concentrate each day on the practice areas needed for improvement, setting daily short-term goals that contribute to the bigger, overarching weekly goal. Furthermore, what’s great about this is that it is scalable: we can change the number of days we dedicate to “super-focused” practice and create monthly goals, splitting each week into smaller goals to help us reach them.
These time management tools will help you create the stepping stones to faster, positive progress and should always be utilised when planning a practice schedule, so remember to make them work for you!
3. Habit Looping - Routine, Reward, Cue
The importance of reward is something that can often be overlooked when we practice our shredding craft. Whilst remaining humble in the company of others is a good trait, there is absolutely no logical reason not to reward and congratulate ourselves on our progress, both big and small, when we practice. Be that as it may, we must remember to do so positively, permitting productive progress to be experienced even when we reward ourselves and not just always for the hard work.
If we think of dedicated, focused practice as our routine, we can profit from the reward upon completion. Rewards can come in various forms: playing our favourite riffs, learning new exciting songs, turning the amp up to 11 and exploring with sounds, or even purchasing new gear and equipment. What’s important about rewarding ourselves is that it leaves us feeling inspired and excited about the instrument at the end of a daily practice session, creating the cue to repeat the routine to get the reward.
Those short-term goals might seem insignificant, but allowing yourself to be happy and excited about achieving them creates a positive habit loop, enabling our confidence daily and maintaining our dedication to completing our weekly schedule.
4. The Bigger Picture
Ultimately, the key thing to remember here is to be perpetually honest with yourself about your playing as it evolves and develops so that you can continue to adjust your practice regime positively. As you grow, your strengths and weaknesses will change, meaning that your goals do too. You may also run into time constraints due to your everyday commitments, and if so, it’s important to remain realistic about what you can achieve with the time you have. Don’t be afraid to tweak your schedule in line with your life: if you have more time to practice, great. If you have less time available, don’t panic: you can always find ways to manage your time to maintain positive practice habits and fine-tune your goals appropriately to plan a weekly schedule that works for you! Remember to regularly review where you are now and where you want to be whilst rewarding yourself for your progress - it will help you see the bigger picture.
