A Powerful, Reflective Practice To Accelerate Your Progress
Nov 02, 2024
Your music practice sessions might not be enough.
If you're reading this, I'm assuming you're someone who values music creation and skill development – be it piano-playing, dance-music production, melody-writing, song-writing, or DJ-ing, for example.
And you probably understand that your progress is determined by the quality of your daily, practice habit.
But what if you could make even more progress, with just one easy addition to your daily music-making process?
Let's consider using a Progress Journal.
Capturing your thoughts and ideas immediately after each music session, is a powerful strategy that helps you:
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Build positive momentum
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Solve problems faster
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Develop effective practice routines
Let's discuss.
What is a Progress Journal?
A progress journal is the space where you capture any ideas that arise from individual music sessions. This can be digital or analogue.
The format is irrelevant. What's more important is the act of keeping track of your ideas.
Personally I've tried both methods – sometimes writing in a high-quality A4 notebook by hand, and sometimes writing in a digital document (on my computer). Currently I'm journaling digitally.
Before we discuss some of the many benefits of keeping a Progress Journal, let's run through a few examples of the types of ideas you might want to capture.
I will use piano-playing for the examples here, although I believe this process will benefit creators of all kinds – be them musicians or otherwise.
(In fact, you can keep separate journals documenting your learnings about any of your interests or pursuits – the idea is to create a centralised space from which you can reflect on your progress.)
What To Write In Your Progress Journal
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'Aha' Moments & Breakthroughs – Sometimes when you're playing piano, a concept or a technique just clicks – you experience a deep sense of understanding. This is the moment when a new connection is born in your mind (or your hands). Write what you have realised. Celebrate these wins.
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Challenges – The process of learning requires challenge. If you begin to notice specific technical (or knowledge-based) issues that keep arising, record them in your journal.
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Questions – As you develop your skills, knowledge and habits, new questions will continually arise. Capture these questions so you can find the answers later.
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What You Worked On – Keep a track of the specific activities you work on during each session. This will help you keep congruent to the goals you are working towards.
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Anything Else – This journal is for you – make it your own. Write anything else that is useful to you on your quest to improve!
Benefits Of Journalling After Creative Sessions
Positive Momentum
Creating a visible journal of your progress is incredibly motivating.
Your small wins, breakthroughs, and 'aha' moments all add up over time: These small achievements are the evidence of your improvement. Every win counts – and no win is too small – they all contribute to steady progress over time.
Even just jotting down that you enjoyed a particular session is important information. It sustains your motivation and reminds you that you're moving forward.
As you read back over your journal entries you can feel proud of everything you have accomplished so far, inspiring you to continue building positive momentum (and making progress).
Problem Solving
When you're building your habits, skills, and knowledge, you're going to face problems – particular challenges that you want to overcome, in order to improve. This is exciting. This is what you want.
Expect challenges. Invite challenges. Embrace challenges. Overcome challenges. Look for new challenges. (Overcoming challenges is how you grow.)
After each music session, reflect on what you found difficult, or specific areas in which you want to deepen your understanding.
Keeping a list of these challenges will provide a relevant and ongoing supply of areas of improvement to work on.
For example, If you notice that a particular section of music is difficult to play with hands together, you might choose to practise that section one hand at a time, before combining them.
This is an excellent method to ensure your playing sessions are intentional and impactful.
Effective Habits
I believe that playing every single day, is the best way to make meaningful progress on the piano. But progress will only be optimal if the way you are practising is effective.
Journalling will instil a sense of awareness about how you practise.
For example, noting down what you have worked on, and for how long, can be really informative.
When you re-read your journal entries, you may realise that for a whole week you've only focused on learning to play a single, new song – and you haven't made time for any improvisational or compositional work (making your own music).
Reflecting on this, you might want to ensure that, next week, you include a more varied range of activities in your music sessions. This will help you invest time into all the areas you want to make progress in. This, of course, depends on what your goals are – but you get the point.
Putting It Into Practice
Hopefully these ideas have inspired you to start introducing a quick (and powerful) journaling practice at the end of your individual music sessions.
I want your journaling habit to be useful to you. So to finish up, here are a few tips on implementing your new journaling habit successfully:
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Make sure your journal is easily accessible – create a shortcut on your computer, or keep your notebook near your piano.
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Don't aim for perfection – this doesn't need to be cumbersome and time consuming. Bullet points are fine. As long as you're able to understand the points you made when you read it back later. Sometimes I complete my journal entries in a couple of minutes, and sometimes I write for over 10 minutes (if the ideas are flowing). Do what is useful for you.
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Track the date, duration and time of practice – I always use a stopwatch to track how long I play for. I also record the time (of day) when I complete each session (this shows me the trends of when I am working on my music).
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Re-read your journal entires – I'd recommend once a week because this can inform your plans for next week's sessions, as well as keep you motivated to keep going.
So now it's over to you.
Be curious about the impact of journaling – you'll only experience the transformational effects of this powerful practice if you take action and give it a go.
