When is the optimal time to practice?
Image by Valentin Schönpos from Pixabay
I always practice a musical instrument 15 minutes per day and have been doing it every day for the past seven years. In these years I have been experimenting with the optimal practice time, and I have tried all of them. What I have found, is that a habit like this works best first thing in the morning. When you open your eyes after a night’s sleep, your mind is fresh and feels like a blank slate. As the day goes on, more and more ideas enter your mind. And at the end of the day, the mind is so full of thoughts and ideas that a night’s sleep is needed to crystalize them, so that the process can start over the next day. That’s why I have found the morning hours to work best, but there are also other factors to consider.
I just finished today’s drum practice session at 05:45 in the morning. This time of day, everyone else (including your family) is probably asleep. If they, aren’t, then just get up even earlier. This means that you have 15 minutes of uninterrupted, hyper-focused practice. No phone calls, no emails, no notifications, no questions to be answered. Only you, your mind, and the task at hand. This goes for any task that is cognitively demanding, but it is also crucial when learning a practical skill like playing the drums. Right now, I am practicing 1/16th note endurance on the kick drum i.e., to create the sound of a machine gun using your feet. I start my metronome and set it on a speed that is slightly beyond my comfort zone, and then increase the speed accordingly as my skill grows. Note that I am talking about continuous practice over weeks and months here, not a single session. When practicing a skill on a level that is beyond your current comfort zone, it is important that you are present and focus on what is going on in your body. Listen to the feet and the muscles as you play. What do they tell you? Give them enough time, and they will tell you the secret about how to play very fast. But you cannot do this if your mind is somewhere else. When practicing guitar, I sometimes like to watch a movie when practicing, jamming along to the soundtrack or just playing whatever comes to mind. But this is something else. This is using the skills that I already know. Real practice is to play what you don’t know to acquire new sets of skills. And you cannot do that if you are not present and focused.
However, there is also something to be said for drum practice later in the day. One could look at it as a reward. Something to look forward to. When you finish all the chores of today, it is truly a good feeling to sit down by the drum kit and smash things with all your might. I personally have a very cognitively demanding job, that requires my attention constantly. I can’t even listen to music while working because I find it too distracting. If you recognize yourself in that situation, it can be so nice to have a physical or practical skill that you can work on when you are done. When you’ve “earned” it. But I have learned the hard way that your day rarely turns out precisely as you intended. Thing happen. And you will need to adjust accordingly. This means that there is a high probability that you will choose to prioritize something more urgent in favor of your practice. This is becomes more and more of a problem, the later in the day you practice.
Routine is important. You don’t brush your teeth randomly throughout the day. You do it once in the morning, and once in the evening. This helps habit formation greatly, especially when starting out. And I suspect that the first thing on your schedule in the morning is something that you have some real control over. Because if you don’t have control over that time slot, all you need to do is to set the alarm 15 minutes earlier and voila! There are no excuses.
When writing this blog piece, I have come to the following conclusions. 1) If you are doing real practice, i.e. learning new skills – Do it the first thing in the morning. 2) If you are “jamming”, i.e. polishing the skills you already know – It is OK to do it later in the day. Practice implies hyper focus on one single task, whereas Jamming is a wholistic approach and thus less sensitive. This can now be used those days when you cannot do or miss the morning practice for some valid (or invalid) reason. In my case, I am learning to play machine gun kick drums, and that should be done first thing in the morning. If I practice later in the day, I should simply practice the whole song instead. I’ll try it out over the coming months and see what happens.
How interesting that ideas like these become concrete by writing them down. It is a testament to the importance of the process of writing.