When I started the research that led to Deliberate Practice, one of the common sense discoveries I made that really helped with my own practicing was to have a pre-written, pre-designed practice schedule for each day of the week before I even took my guitar off its stand.
And each exercise had a specific time that needed to be spent on it.
And up until today I used the clock on my Mac Book and just kind of assessed when each exercise was over. It worked, but it was very rough and ready.
So What Changed Today?
For some reason I Googled timer today – and I found a really simple tool that nevertheless is excellent. It’s a Shareware App (you can get a pro version pretty cheaply) and it’s called Timer 6.3.1 For Mac. It’s made by a company called Apimac, and you can get it here:
http://www.apimac.com/downloads/index.php
Here’s what it looks like:
What’s great about it is that you can set it to count down for your exercise time, do your exercise, and it beeps when it’s finished. So you can tick off your exercise, gather yourself (or noodle), reset it and get on with the next exercise.
If a phone call does come in that you have to take you can pause the timer, and then resume when you’ve finished.
It’s simple. It works. It’s great. Go get it now.
(for PC users I’ll try and find a similar PC app and post it)