Every session logged with its minutes and what you worked on, the daily practice habit sitting beside it, and the hours behind each piece — so progress stops being a feeling about how the last run went.
The paper practice diary lasted three weeks. The metronome counts beats, not weeks. So the only record of a session is how it felt at the end, and how it felt at the end is mostly a report on the last five minutes. Scales, sight-reading and the two bars that keep collapsing all get whatever attention is left over.
A grade exam in June, the four pieces for a wedding gig, an EP you are tracking — each a project with a real date. Learned, up to tempo, played from memory: those are milestones, and they turn four vague months into a sequence you can actually be behind or ahead of.
Bars 40 to 56 at 60bpm. Twenty minutes of sight-reading. Restring before Thursday. Each with an estimate in minutes and a due date, recurring where it should recur. Today shows the session as a short list, so the hard bar has a slot in it rather than a good intention behind it.
Set the habit to the days you genuinely play — six, or four, not a guilt-shaped seven. The streak, the strength score and the year-long graph then show the real pattern: the fortnight you stopped, the month you did not, and what each one did to how the pieces sounded.
Log a session against the instrument or the discipline — technique, repertoire, ear training, improvisation — with the minutes and what it was. The hours accumulate and the activity graph fills in. Ask how much sight-reading you have really done this year and there is a number rather than a shrug.
The recital or the grade goes in as a goal with its date. Each piece becomes a project with milestones — learned, up to tempo, memorised. Add practice as a habit on the days you really play.
Do the twenty minutes, then log it against technique or repertoire with the minutes. Deciding what to call it takes longer than recording it, and after a fortnight the record is doing the remembering.
A few months in, the hours say where the time actually went, and it is usually the comfortable material. You aim the next month at the gap, and the recital arrives with the hard bar already solved.
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