According to Frank Zappa, "You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer." Someday this quote will probably turn out to be disappointingly apocryphal, like that fabulous bit about the music business once attributed to Hunter S. Thompson, but until then, I'm rolling with it. This month in the Fingerstyle Five we're working on how to organize your practice time, which has got me working on organizing my work time, too. It's an endless, ongoing project really, but to paraphrase Zappa, you can't really get anything done unless you have a specific project and a deadline. It helps if you have some kind of coffee, or a Napoleonic degree of focus, but at the very least you need a specific project.

At least, that's my latest premise. The good thing about having any premise at all is – well, maybe hypothesis is a better word, because what I was going to say is, the great thing about having any premise at all is that you can subject it to daily experimentation, weigh the results, and try to improve how you act on it the next day. I rarely feel like I've gotten as much done in a day as I'd like, but now I have something a lot more specific to measure – not just "did I work on this project today?" but "did I do this particular piece of the project, by noon today?" Which means maybe I can get better at getting the important stuff done, and spend less time stress-eating honey dijon potato chips (really??) and checking various and assorted meaningless internet stats every 10 minutes.

While it's taken me ages to apply it to other things, this is how I've looked at practicing for a long time, and the kind of thing I generally roll out when anyone asks about what they can do to get better at guitar. Among all the usual stuff, I routinely recommend sitting down once a week to give yourself a sort of lesson, to write out the things you're going to work on for the next several days. That way, when you pick up your guitar to practice, you can jump right in without wondering "what should I work on today?" And at the end of that week, you can look at what you wrote down and ask yourself "so how did it go?" Take all that into account as you plan the next week, and after several weeks or several months, you'll start to have a much better idea of how to shape your practicing, how much you can get done in a week, and how to choose things that will really help you get better over time. Small specific projects, done on a deadline.

This is the iteration part of getting good, and it's one of the three things I talk about in today's Youtube video, "What Kind Of Artist Are You?", inspired by a recent trip to the Getty museum in L.A. You can find the video here:

What Kind Of Artist Are You?

More soon,

David