🎹 Practice with me! How I organize my Practice Journal

Hello everyone! Let’s talk about how you can use the Weekly Journal in the Efficient Musician Practice Planner to organize your time in the practice room. 

I tracked my own practice this week in order to give you an example and (hopefully) some inspiration. Keep reading for some *satisfying* and productive dopamine hits!  

For the purpose of this blogpost, I transferred my markings to a scan of the notebook.

Let’s start with page one :)

First things first, let’s talk about my habit of the week... 

My pinky has been an issue for the longest time. For as long as I can remember, my teachers have been telling me to relax my pinky, hold it down, and everything under the sun to get it under control. 

Oh boy... Now that I’ve told you one of my greatest weaknesses, you can go back and watch all of my videos (especially the earlier ones) and look for it 😳 ...

You can see it creep back into my playing whenever I am playing a difficult passage, or when I don’t feel comfortable with a section of the music. It’s a thing :)

Anyway, it’s probably going to be a lifelong goal of mine to relax that pesky pinky. So you will probably see it in another habit of the week sometime again. 

For my weekly To do List, I am learning Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 1 for a practice vlog series (be sure to check some of those out on my channel!). For those of you who are following the series, I have already briefly covered the first movement, and am now moving onto the second - which means I have to start memorizing soon (the most dreaded step in learning a piece)... 

In addition, I have to record Mozart’s Piano Sonata K. 448 for a secret project for the channel, as well as practice some Bach for a Practice Buddy episode.

For each of the items on the list, I have either checked them off or drawn an arrow, signifying a transfer onto the next week’s practice journal. (Drawing arrows for incomplete items was inspired by the BuJo method, which I have been a fan of for a long time.)

Next, you can each day’s practice notes, including a detailed report of what I practiced that day (again, with check marks or arrows), along with my time spent at the piano, mood, and efficiency trackers. For me, this is the funnest part of keeping a practice journal 😍

Notice that although my to-do list is but a brief summary of what I need to do this week, I take the liberty of expanding and altering the things on that list as needed in the daily notes section.

On Friday I ended up taking a break from practicing. One of the things that was important to me when I was designing this notebook was that it needed to give the musician the freedom to choose what day they wanted to have off during the week. 

Here was my second page: 

When it comes to the mood tracker, I love looking back and seeing patterns in what I was practicing, how long it took, and my productivity. Very often, they go hand in hand. 

For example, my mood when memorizing the 2nd movement of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 (which I ended up transferring to next week) was not the best. That is probably a direct result of fear of memorization 😂.

Another thing I noticed is that when I am in a good mood, my efficiency is also high, which makes perfect sense! 

Little things like this are interesting and helpful, if not just amusing to note when practicing using the Efficient Musician Practice Planner.