Six months of habit: the twenty-minute rule and the days I skipped
Six months of practice logged in a notebook, one line per day: date, start time, minutes, what I worked on, one word for how it felt. The log says I practiced 152 of the last 183 days. The thirty-one missed days are not evenly spread. Nine of them are in the first four weeks, when I was practicing whenever I felt like it, which turned out to be whenever the evening had nothing better in it. Eleven more are in August, when a work deadline and a vacation together broke the chain. In the last two months I missed four days.
The change that made the difference was moving practice to the morning. I had assumed evenings were the natural time, and in the first weeks I would sit down at nine or ten at night, tired, with headphones, and get through about half of what I intended. In September I tried 6:40 in the morning, before coffee and before anyone else was up, and it stuck immediately. The piano is in the bedroom, so it is a matter of getting out of bed and sitting down. There is nothing to decide. The log for October and November is almost all morning sessions and almost all of them say either “fine” or “good.”
The other rule is the twenty-minute rule, which I borrowed from someone who used it for running: the commitment is twenty minutes, not an hour, and twenty minutes always counts. On a bad day I do twenty and stop. On a good day I do twenty and keep going, and the average session this month is thirty-four minutes. But the floor is twenty, and knowing the floor is low is what gets me onto the bench on the days I do not want to.
What a session looks like now: five minutes of scales in whatever key the current piece is in, both hands, two octaves, with the metronome at a tempo where I can be accurate. Ten minutes on the hardest two measures of whatever I am learning. Then the rest of the time on the piece itself, or on an old piece if the new one is making me angry.
Six months in, I can play eight short pieces from the course books, read treble clef fluently and bass clef slowly, and play the C, G, D and F major scales at a moderate speed without looking at my hands. None of that would have survived the first winter without the log, the mornings and the floor of twenty minutes.