How many hours a day should you practice?

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http://www.bulletproofmusician.com/how-many-hours-a-day-should-you-practice/

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A very interesting article!

To bring it to the drawing arena with pressure scales as an example-
After several years of doing scales in pencil and charcoal daily I started feeling that the exercise is both fun and relaxing, which means that the practice is no longer deliberate :hushed:
After reading this I think I might challenge myself by imposing a time constraint or doing it in a deferrent medium (perhaps using ink).

What would you suggest doing differently to continue getting the best out of the exersise?

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What an excellent question Stella!

While many (including Anders Ericsson himself) would argue that deliberate practice is often not fun—I am sure that some out there do enjoy the process or components of it. So I am not certain that finding the activity relaxing disqualifies it as deliberate practice. :wink:

Variation on the exercises would indeed introduce a growth potential though. Altering direction/orientation, spatial or time constraints, using different surfaces, etc., can definitely grow the adaptability of your continuously-developing skill set. However, after a certain point you can continue to reinforce the automaticity that we strive for in the scale exercises by rolling the pressure control into more complex tasks (like gradation blocks, patterns, and repetitions found in our program).

Let me know what variations you decide to add. What you come up with may help another on the same journey.

Best wishes,

Anthony

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Hehe, I agree, I guess what I meant by “fun” is that what felt before like running a sprint became a leisure run in the park. Both can be fun, but perhaps the later doesn’t achieve the same goal after a while :thinking:

Will experiment and report back :+1:

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That is a great article. Coming from a career as a musician I try to practice mindfully in many of my other endeavors in life such as learning to paint. (But I need to do a lot better at this.) One of my favorite flute books says at the front “Technical progress is a question of time, patience and intelligent work”.

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