Why the Best Practice Feels Less Productive

Activity

The concept of productivity is an interesting one because it’s really about optimising the rate of progress. However, often by attempting to do that, we can, in fact, make ourselves less productive because we measure productivity by optimising for the wrong thing. Many people seemingly judge a practice session by how much time they spent practicing that day, or they measure productivity by how quickly they can get to the end of a piece of music. But the interesting thing about learning any skill is that the most productive thing is often the most mundane.

You often hear when people talk about those at the top of their field, whether they are elite tennis players, football players, actors or musicians, that what you’re really seeing is the culmination of someone working for years and years in obscurity. Well, that obscurity usually consists of very ordinary, unexceptional work. It isn’t an attempt at finding the quickest way to do something; it’s making sure that the things you can do, you do exceptionally well.

This means that what we perceive as productive should be the things that are going to make us the best player we possibly can be in the shortest possible time, rather than what is going to help us learn the piece we are learning as fast as possible or simply play for the longest on any given day. Things like learning the notes of a piece of music quickly or spending ten hours in a day practicing can, in fact, work directly against productive practice if they come at the expense of mastery.

Progress

So what is the mundane, and what is productive practice?

Well, the aim on every level is mastery. If you genuinely want to improve as quickly as possible at the piano, rather than simply optimising for learning to press keys, then everything you do should aim at making the piano a skill that is as innate as possible.

That means stopping frequently when something doesn’t feel automatic. It means repeating tiny sections with the aim of having complete control over your movements. It means occasionally playing far slower than you’re capable of playing so your hands get used to the correct movement path.

Many players will spend their practice time pushing the tempo, playing through the piece and ignoring mistakes in the hope that time at the piano itself will solve them. However, this method of practice isn’t productive because it isn’t optimising for becoming as good a pianist as quickly as possible. It’s optimising for getting through the piece of music as quickly as possible, regardless of the cost.

The reason for me writing this particular Monday Music Tip is because I think many players don’t realise or consider what they’re optimising for. When we sit down at the piano to practice, what often feels like the most productive work is the work that feels like it’s moving us forward. Pushing on through a piece of music gives us that feeling more than anything else. You can see from the start of a practice session to the end that you’ve quantifiably learnt and played new notes. But playing something correctly eight times out of ten rather than seven times out of ten from your last practice session doesn’t feel nearly as rewarding. Yet this is the type of practice that affects your playing holistically and will always win out in the end because it improves your ability as a pianist, not just your ability to play your current piece.

Patience

So what can you measure that helps optimise for real productivity?

The first thing you can actually measure is consistency. Those who practice consistently over a long period will almost always outperform those who practice intensely over the short term. This is because mastery takes multiple visits. You can learn a new technique today on the piano, but it may take ten separate practice sessions before it feels like something that’s natural under your fingers.

Secondly, measure the number of consecutive times you get something right that you previously got wrong. If you make a mistake in a piece of music, isolate that mistake, slow it down and aim to play it five times in a row correctly. If you can do that, then increase the difficulty by increasing the speed or by adding some context around the mistake, and then try to get to five again.

Both of these objectives optimise for mastery and will make you a far better player much more quickly.

Most long-term improvement comes from consistently solving hundreds of small problems. It’s making sure that everything you work on today makes the next piece, and the piece after that, easier to learn. The mistake is really treating your current piece as the goal, when the real goal is the pieces you’ll be learning in a few years.

For those who have goals of playing a Chopin etude, being able to improvise without thought or achieving any other long-term ambition, you need to remember that what you’re learning today should be learned in a way that makes those future objectives easier. That is why good practice often feels less productive. It may take you longer to learn your current piece because you’re spending more time developing mastery than simply getting to the end. However, every skill you truly master carries forward into the next piece and the one after that. So while good practice is often slower in the short term, it is far quicker over months and years.

I don’t remember the piece I was learning 15 years ago, but I do remember that, at the time, it felt like the most difficult thing I would ever be able to play. Looking back now, I realise that how I practiced that piece had a direct impact on every piece I’ve learnt since. If I could give my younger (less attractive) self one piece of advice, it definitely wouldn’t be to learn that piece faster. It would be to learn it better, because the skills I developed while learning it stayed with me long after the piece itself had been forgotten.

Matt