Logging My Practice Time

Recently I decided to throw away my concerns about privacy and joined Facebook. One of my friends is my cello teacher. Last year he logged an average of almost 4 hours a day of practice time, a really impressive number, which I found out about in one of his wall posts. I say almost 4 hours because he was so close...but missed it by 20 seconds a day....he was bummed. What got me thinking about tracking how much I practice was listening to him talk about how he logs his practice time, what counts as practice time, and how he finds the time to practice.

For nearly 20 years I've kept a training log of my workouts, which now that I'm not training for any sort of competition, seems rather useless. But then again, I can see when I miss a day, or 2, and the log screams at me when there is an empty spot or an notation of "rest day - no time" (hopefully because it was a travel day...really no way to make the time).

So I've started tracking my cello practice time, noting the time in my training log. My goal is to average an hour a day over the year. That seems to be a realistic amount of time that I can spend, balancing work, family, exercise, and other life demands.

I've read other cello-related blogs and seen that many of you also log what you're doing as well as how long. I can't figure out why I have that discipline for my exercise log but don't really want to track what I'm doing during my practice time. I guess that I feel that the proof of how well I'm spending my practice time is measured by what my playing sounds like. How do you measure "producing a better quality sound"? So while I figure that out I'll just track how much time I spend practicing...all the while wishing that I could figure out how to allocate more time to playing the cello.