Practicing juuuust long enough
Measure what matters. (Image by Just killing time)
How do you know exactly how much to practice a new skill or how long to spend preparing for a performance or speech?
You can go through the motions until things are pretty familiar; you can push yourself past the point of exhaustion through relentless repetition.
But the best approach is to carefully calibrate your effort to exactly what is needed, no more no less, using something I call the Comfort Scale.
I’ll explain how it works by using piano as an example, but there are many applications.
First, we aim to play one note with beauty and precision and add on from there, as Kenny Werner suggests in his book Effortless Mastery. Everything else that we play should be no more difficult than playing that one note.
This means that we have to break our work down into small chunks. So even though we may have an entire blueprint for what we’re creating, we are going to play the role of the mason. Our aim is to be precise, methodical, and focused on the present moment, one perfectly aligned brick at a time.
The good news is that this approach, slow as it may seem, yields fast results.
Here’s the workflow:
Choose a place to start. Generally, the end of a phrase or the end of the piece is best -- it allows you to take advantage of the magic of backchaining, where every action suggests the next action because you’ve added on from the end.
Select a note or series of notes that you believe you can play correctly on the first try.
Play your selection, as slowly as possible, using perfect technique.
Evaluate yourself based on the Comfort Scale, where 10 is “that was as easy as playing one note” and 1 is “that was like trying to have a picnic on top of Mount Washington.”
If your comfort score is below 5, do a smaller chunk of music, go slower, or both.
If your score is 5 - 7, play the exact same thing again.
If your score is 8 or above, add a little more to your selection, and then repeat the steps.
Quit practicing or move to a different type of practice activity when you feel the slightest bit of fatigue or boredom.
Note that we are only doing enough repetition to get to a comfort score of eight. Additional repetitions do not accomplish anything and can actually be detrimental to your playing.
Using these techniques, you will avoid the hole that so many would-be musicians fall into where the quality of their playing actually declines as they move forward. This tends to happen because the repertoire becomes too difficult and the student stops being motivated to practice, creating a downward spiral. By contrast, you will find that your playing gets easier as you progress, not harder. Brick by brick, you’re building knowledge and skill, and you’re never asking yourself to make giant leaps that require a stretch of your abilities.
By keeping focused on tiny increments of forward progress and paying close attention to your comfort score, you will build confidence as you learn. The exciting part is that consistency over time actually enables you to make effortless leaps forward. This is where you’ll start to realize that you can do things that you haven’t already practiced, Spiderman-style. You are beginning to speak the language of music.
It may take a little practice to correctly identify where you are on the Comfort Scale. People are sometimes reluctant to quantify their performance, instead saying things like, “That was okay,” or “That wasn’t very good.” But using a number removes the value judgement. Our work is neither good nor bad — we’re only looking at how comfortable it is.
You may notice that, after a few cycles, you get impatient and stop repeating your thing enough times to get to an eight. You may also find yourself getting perfectionistic and trying for a ten. Both extremes are going to undermine your progress and will also diminish how much you enjoy the process. It would be better to end the practice session than to ignore the Comfort Scale.
If the goal of your performance is to make it look and feel easy, the Comfort Scale allows you to build that in from the start, with no wasted effort. You can learn more in less time, with more confidence than you may have imagined possible.