7 Ways You Could be Using Your Practice Time Better - PHH 139

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Welcome to the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast. I'm Ann Sullivan, a harpist on a mission to empower every harpist to experience more harp happiness. Over my decades long harp journey, I've had lots of successes and more than a few failures. And I know firsthand what it's like to feel that playing the harp the way you want me may not be possible for you. Now, I play and teach all over the world, and I know what most harpists are never taught the secrets to gaining the skills and confidence you need to play the harp with beauty, freedom and joy. That's what the Practicing Harp Happiness Podcast is all about, showing you simple steps to help you play the music you want the way you want. If you're an experienced harpist looking for that next level, or a harp newbie anxious to avoid the pitfalls, or a harpist who just wants more fulfillment and a little encouragement, you're in the right place, my friend. So let's get started. Welcome to the show. At its most fundamental, music is sound over time. When you take away the rich harmonies, the soaring melodies, complex structures and intricate rhythms, that's all you have left. Sound over time. It doesn't sound very creative or artistic, I know, but those two elements are the basis of all music. How any single performer combines them is where the artistry lies. However, that kind of time, the meter and the rhythm isn't our topic for today. The kind of time management I want to explore with you today is more about the practical side of our harp experience and than the artistic side. It's about your practice time, how you spend it, what you focus on, and how you set your intentions for the day or for the week. We're also going to talk about the time it takes you to learn a piece. I am frequently asked how long it should take to learn a piece, and it's a question without a simple answer. There are numerous factors to consider, of course, including the amount of time you have to practice and your current skill level as compared to the difficulty level of the piece. But perhaps the most important factor is how well you manage your journey through the different learning stages of a piece. That journey is a little different for all of us, but I want you to walk away from this episode with a few action steps that you know will make a difference for you. I want you to get to the fun part, playing music instead of staying stuck in practice mode. So we are going to review 7 Ways to make better use of your practice time so you can make progress faster, learn music faster, and one of those ways will be adapting the best practice practices to your own particular learning style. We'll revisit the German Shepherd, Greyhound and Beagle learning styles and give you some specific strategies that will suit your own practice breed. I do realize that talking about practice and planning your practice and managing time perhaps isn't the most fun thing you can think of to talk about. And so before we dive into that, I thought I'd share just a little bit of Harp Happiness with you and share some of the wonderful entries that are coming in on our 2024 harp happiness challenge, which is in the Harp Mastery Hub. The Hub is our free online community and it's exclusive to Heart Mastery, so you have none of the extraneous social media stuff. And we are running a challenge all through the month of January. It's totally free. It's very.

Low stakes. In other words, you don't have to show up every day. All you need to do is as you go through your week, do some things, experience some things that bring you more harp happiness, then note them down at the end of the week and post each week to tell us what harp happiness you had. This week. We've got some great entries coming in. A lot of people who are really enjoying harp column's 30 day practice challenge, especially enjoying Peace Prayer the Peace by Rhett Barnwell. So we have a lot of people who are enjoying that. We have some people who have started putting together pretty habit trackers for their practice. We have others number of people who have finally, you know, organized those piles of music and gotten things sorted out and that was harp Happiness. Others who listened to performances, watched videos.

Lit a candle to make their practice space cozier, which I think is just great. We have a lot of people who are just enjoying playing the harp. Oh, I got time to practice. Finally cleared off the music stand, cleared my schedule, researched harps. A few people who bought new harps, which is kind of extremely cool. That's taking Harp happiness to a new level for sure. People who who are enjoying playing meditatively. I'm also posting in the challenge and so my little post it note shows up there too. And I had some rehearsal time.

I'm working on learning a new piece, bringing back some things in my repertoire, just really enjoying things. Lots of people are doing research and investigating and it's just a fun thing to do. And as I said, it doesn't take any time. But but if you are participating in all the weeks of the challenge, we're holding a random drawing at the end of the month and the Winner from all the complete entries will be eligible to win. Well, the winner will win a 25 gift certificate to our harp mastery shop for anything that we have there. So just a little added incentive to add to your harp happiness along the way. So I invite you to join us there. It's really a ton of fun. You, you will find the link to the challenge in the show notes for this episode and of course you can go right onto heartmastery.com and you'll find out how to join the hub there and then you can join the challenge that way too. We would love to have you with us. The more harp happiness, the better off we all are.

Okay, so let's get down to business and let's talk about managing your practice time. We know that practice is the engine of our progress. We know that without practice we don't make progress. We know that our practice needs to be regular. We can't cram it, can't just do it every now and then and expect to get anywhere. We know all these things. But what we don't always have a lot of expertise around is knowing what to do with that practice time when we get it scheduled, you know, so assuming that it gets onto your schedule to start with and that you've got this block of time, you sit at the harp and what is the best thing to do with it? A lot of people have asked me, you know, well, how much time should I spend doing this or doing this or doing this? And I have done different, what I call practice pie breakdowns in the past where I said, well, you know, just a couple of minutes on a warm up and some of this time on technique and then some on a couple of pieces and some else some other time on repetition and then maybe some time on a musicianship skill you want to develop, whether it's note reading or improvising or anything like that. But when you chunk down the time to that level of detail, most of us don't have a big enough chunk of time to allow us to get everything done. This is a function of what I consider thinking too small. Okay, I'm going to do two minutes of warm up and I'm going to do eight minutes of technique time. So I have an hour. So I've spent 10 minutes. Okay, so now I'm going to do 10 minutes on this piece and 10 minutes on this piece and then I'm going to do some of this and some of this. And that takes care of your hour. But then what happens is you have it beautifully planned and you sit in front of the harp and you've got your timer, your stopwatch, whatever it is, and you're going to stick to your hour and you're going to get everything done. And you sit there and you try to do it, and you figure out that 10 minutes isn't enough for this. I want more time. And it feels really frustrating because if you spend more time to do what you think you need to do to accomplish something to make progress on it, you've thrown your schedule out the window. So, you know, you start to wonder about the value of planning your practice. And that really is what I call thinking too small. When it's too small, you can get just bogged down by trying to do juggle all those balls. On the other hand, you might be thinking too big and say, okay, well, I've got this whole hour of practice and I can sort of luxuriate in my hour. And you start and you start practicing something and you just get carried away. And then you realize that here it is, the end of the hour, and, oh, well, yeah, you worked on that piece, but you didn't work on the technique stuff that you wanted to do, and you really wanted to get to some repertoire review today, and you didn't fit that in. That's just thinking about your practice as this big chunk and not really using it wisely. So we can either chunk it down to those little segments that are too small to do us any good, or be a little bit more generous about our idea about using the time and then not get anything done. Neither of those is ideal, obviously. Either one of them, you know, a bunch of small chunks or devoting an entire practice session to one thing, either can be good, like anything else, in moderation. But if you stick with one of them all the time, it's going to lead you to frustration. Obviously, progress is going to slow down and you're not going to see the results that you're really looking for. So managing time in your practice is all about using that effectively, figuring out what you need to do and how you're going to get it done, not just in a daily context, but perhaps in. In a slightly longer, like weekly sort of context. So we're going to have to figure out a way to balance all those different practice objectives. So here's the first thing we're going to talk about, and that is truly clock management.

Maybe you're a sports fan, and in games like football or like soccer, where that clock is just basketball too, right? The clock is really, really important.

That managing the time that you've got, particularly as you get close to the end of the game, is so important. And you might be watching a game and you'll hear the commentators talk about, oh, this coach really knows how to manage the clock well. So that when the time is ticking by, they want to control the ball, they want to keep the other team from scoring, they want to score. Whatever it is, managing that time can be the difference, and often is, between winning or losing. Our objectives are not so clear, our outcomes are not so concrete as winning or losing. For us, clock management, though, is just as important. And really, in our practice, clock management means knowing when to stop. I know that seems funny to just lay on you just like that, but. But I'm not talking about stopping your practice for the day, although I suppose that could come into it. But the thing is that whatever it is you're working on that day, whether you're trying to sort out a particular passage or speed up a piece, or play a whole piece through, or memorize something, whatever it is, you're not going to get it done in one day or in one practice session. Music isn't a once and done sort of activity. We can't practice a piece and get it right and then say, okay, it's done forever. Like hang it in a frame on the wall or post it on the refrigerator or just, you know, put a little stamp on it and say, done, check onto the next thing. Because we can get it right today, but we have to get it right again tomorrow and the next day and the next day. Every time we do it, it's fresh. So in your practice, you can practice to the point of perfection if that's what you're looking for. I've got it, I've got it, it's all right.

But if that's what you've done, you're going to have to redo it again tomorrow.

Progress in practice growth in music happens over a longer time frame. So you don't need to get it finished today because you're going to have to work on it again tomorrow. And that finish, that, that finished ideal, whatever it is for the piece or the passage or the technique, whatever you're working on, that finish point is going to come gradually over time and you're going to work up to it so you don't have to get it all done in one day. So this comes back a little bit to what? To those small practice segments, right, that I was talking about before, those little ten minute kind of things. Ten minutes isn't enough Perhaps to really work on something. But even if you had 20 minutes to work on a particular piece, you're probably not going to accomplish everything you want to accomplish with that piece in those 20 minutes. But you have to know when to stop and say, great, I've gotten this far today. Now I know where I'm going to start tomorrow. And you'll have more to do on it tomorrow. But the thing is, no matter how long you spent on it today, you'd have to do more on it tomorrow anyway. So the key here to clock management, and this is our tip number one, is knowing when to stop. Set a time limit for working on a piece. If you are the type that just gets into it and you run over, and then you don't have enough time for the other things you want to do. Set a timer and you can set it for as long as you like if you want. If you have an hour to practice and you want to spend 50 of those minutes on that one piece, and you just want to spend a few minutes getting to a couple other things, that's great.

But then stop when it's time to stop. That's what you need to do. So be very aware. Work your clock management. Now, on the other hand, you have to be able to get started. So that's a different kind of problem. Right now we're talking about knowing when to stop. Okay, so that's tip number one. Here's tip number two. We're going to talk about practice rotation, how to get to everything. Even if you don't have time to get to everything every day, this comes naturally from what we were just talking about. If you're going to have to do that work again tomorrow anyway, then you don't have to get to everything every single day. If you have seven things, for instance, whether they're pieces or exercises or anything else that you want to get to in your practice session. If you focus on three or four on day one and you just touch on the others, and then day two, you focus on the other ones and just touch on the ones you spent so much time on in day one, you'll be getting the benefit of practicing on something over time and knowing it better over time. But still you'll be able to get to everything. So you don't have to get to everything in one day. You might set it up any number of ways. Here's one suggestion. Let's say you have some technical work you want to do, and you've got a couple repertoire pieces that you're working on. And you're learning them. And you've got three review pieces that you want to keep fresh in your fingers. And maybe you want to work on some sight reading too. Now that would be a lot to put into one practice session, particularly if your practice session is only an hour or so. So let's see how you might break that down. Well, maybe the technique work you've decided is really important. So that's something you want to do every day. And you figure it's going to take you about 15 minutes. Okay, we're going to put that 15 minute chunk right and we're going to do that every day. Then you've got a couple pieces you're learning and the review pieces and the sight reading. Well, let's devote one long chunk of time to one of those pieces you're learning. Maybe give it 20 minutes and then maybe just a five minute chunk on the other one. Figuring that on the first day we'll do a lot of piece A and a little of piece B. And then on day two, you're going to switch it. You'll still do your technique work, but you'll do a lot of piece B and a little bit of piece A. And that will keep that moving forward. Then we have three review pieces and a sight reading thing to fit into that last portion of your practice. So you could decide that you want to do your sight reading every day and you'll spend a few minutes at that and a different repertoire review piece every day. Or you could do one review piece each day and a little bit of sight reading if that's what fit in. Or you could decide that that's going to be this sort of free flowing chunk of your practice and you'll be able to do whatever you want to do with that last 20 minutes or so of your practice after you've done the other things. That's also not a bad way to do it. So setting up that kind of rotation is terrific. And there are simple ways to do it. You can do it just by reordering the music music stand, writing yourself a little post it note, sticking it there. You can keep a practice journal, you can put it on a spreadsheet, you can make it as complicated as you like if that's what you want to do. Or you can make it very basic and very simple. But the trick is to get to everything over the course of several days or a week. But you don't have to get to everything every day. It's a wonderfully relaxing way, takes all kinds of pressure off It's a great way to, to plan your practice.

But there's a third way that is even a little bit more bare bones, but yet at the same time, a little bit more focused. You can choose your priority for any given day and still not let everything else totally go. If today is the day that you just want to really dig into that piece and you really just want to hammer it and work really hard on it, but, you know, you have other things you've been working on, and you really don't want to lose those, this is a tweak for you, and this is the kind of tweak that is helpful for people who just love to lose themselves in their practice, and that's when they lose track of time. So for you, this clock management is going to be great because it's going to be. It's going to allow you to work the way you want to work. You're going to choose your priority for the day, and if it is, boy, I really want to work on that piece, and I just want to dig in and do it. Okay, well, let's do that. And then choose a few minutes at the beginning of your practice or at the end, whichever seems to work for you. You know, 10, 15 minutes, depending, to touch on those other things that, you know, you really still want to work on. You know, maybe you just want to run through your technique work and, and review a couple of the other pieces that you're working on, and you can do that in 10, great. Get those out of the way, and then you can concentrate on the thing that you want to work on for the rest of your practice session. You get to choose your priority, and you can keep the same priority for a bunch of days. If you really want to make big progress on that piece and that small chunk of time where you do everything else will keep those close enough to the surface that you won't have lost so much ground with them. Or you can switch it up and choose a different priority every day. You get to choose, which is the wonderful thing about practice. But any of these three ways, the knowing when to stop, clock management strategy, the rotation strategy, and choosing the priority, any of those three will help you manage your practice time. And you don't have to do the same one every day. If you're the site, if you're the type that likes to, you know, be set in your ways and have a particular habit, and this is what you do, choose one and stick with it, by all means. But if you kind of like to mix things up, then Do a different one every day. But if you're doing the rotation one, let me warn you, if you're doing the rotation thing, that is a strategy that happens over a longer time frame, right? Because the rotation only works if you get to everything over a particular number of days. So you can't just, you know, abandon that midstream. Everything else, you can decide to pick and choose. So there are a bunch of strategies for managing your practice time. But let's get to the second part that we want to talk about today, and that's managing your learning time for a piece. The first thing I want to impress upon you that's so important for any kind of learning of a piece is the power of a due date. Deciding when you want to get to that next stage of learning is pretty powerful because you will find ways to meet it. And that's what we're going to talk about right now. We're all familiar with the idea of a deadline in terms of a performance date when that piece has to be ready. I mean, here we are in January. We just came through December, which is a month filled with performance dates, right? Those Christmas pieces have to be ready Christmas Eve. That's the due date. They have to be ready. But the thing is, you can set due dates for the various learning stages along the way so that when you're in the beginning stage of learning, you can decide when you would like to be done with that. If you're in the messy middle, you can decide when you'd like to be done with that. There's no set moment when anybody can say, okay, past the beginning stage, chunk past the middle stage. Check that box. There's no objective criterion for this. You get to set it. And the idea is generally the beginning stage of learning any piece should be quick, because the beginning stage is all about just getting familiarity with what you've got to learn and what you don't really have to work so hard on. You know, give it a week, use that, and then start diving into the messy middle. What's the middle about? The middle is about developing familiarity and really creating the habits and learning the piece as much as you can. You're going to be able to. At the end of the messy middle, you're going to be able to play it pretty much beginning to end, pretty much a tempo with, you know, not so many mistakes, but it's going to start to sound like music. That's the object of the messy middle, making it music. So when you think of these in those sorts of terms, rather than I have to have this done and this done and this done. You can see it's easier to manage your practice with that due date. So, all right, you pick up a new piece and we want to get out of that beginning stage and really start digging into it as quickly as we can. Give yourself a week to do that. Yes. It will vary a little bit on how long the piece is and how hard it is for you. So if it's a very long piece, you know, if it's one of those eight pages or something, you may want to use different stages for different parts of the piece. So you might decide that, okay, I'm going to learn the first two pages. That's going to be my starting point and I'll get to the rest of it later. That's okay too. Give yourself a date for it. Right? Say, okay, I now have a week to learn this piece or learn the first two pages or whatever it is. So here are some tactics for doing that, some things that will help you speed through. Because perhaps you're not used to feeling that comfortable with the piece right away. The first thing I always recommend is start right away playing the piece hands together. Don't wait for hands separately to be right before you put the hands together. Work both ways, hands together and hands separately. Right from the very beginning. The hands separately will help you pay attention to the details, but the hands together coordination is where we want to be and we need to get there right away. That's the most important thing for speeding up the beginning stage. And I know it might feel uncomfortable, and I know it's hard to do, but it also has huge long term benefits. Not only will it speed up the beginning stage for you, but it's going to help you learn to read the music faster. Every time you do this, the next time is going to be easier, it's going to feel less daunting. So get used to hands together from the very beginning. That's the number one way to speed up the beginning stage. Another thing, of course, that a lot of people like to do is to listen to a recording of it. So at least you kind of know how the piece goes. That can be a huge help. Not as helpful as starting hands together, but it's a big help and that's certainly a good thing to do. Another thing to do is to, when you're listening to the recording or not, either way, read the piece through, look at the whole thing, see what you can see, look for patterns, look for anything that gives you information. Consider the title, consider the Composer do. You can do a little bit of research, too. Not too long, because you really need to be practicing. But that can also help give you an understanding of what the piece is about, and that will help direct your practicing.

So what about the messy middle? How do we manage that? Well, once again, this is about turning your piece into music. It's about taking it and, yeah, doing all the. All the scut work, all the hard detail work that you want to do, that you need to do to play the piece well. But someplace in this messy middle, it starts becoming music. Do not ignore the dynamics. This is the stage to really learn those well. So you're going to be doing a lot of repetitions because that's part of this process. Your fingers need to learn it, your ears and eyes need to learn it. You're going to be doing lots of repetitions, but be sure you're doing them with focus so that it's not. And this goes beyond just paying attention to what you're doing. Choose a musical focus to go along with trying to get your fingers through that passage one more time. Make sure that you're thinking about phrasing and dynamics. Make sure that you're thinking about how this section of the piece relates to the other ones. And your job is to turn this into music.

Along with that, you're going to be talking about playing the piece from beginning to end without stopping. That's a skill you need to start developing in this stage. And you're going to be doing more and more playing of the piece and less and less practicing. So it sounds like you're doing a lot in this stage, and you are. This is the longest stage of learning. The finish stage, of course, doesn't necessarily have an end because we're always finishing the piece. You could conceivably say that's the longest stage, but this is the one that seems interminable because you are taking the stuff that is just really messy and you're turning it into music. That's what happens in this stage. But give yourself a deadline, whether it's two weeks or three weeks or six weeks, whatever it turns out to be, give yourself a deadline, a due date. I want to be playing this piece. I want this piece to be pretty close to tempo, maybe a little bit still under tempo. That's okay. But I want it to be able to play it beginning to end, and have it start to sound like music and start to feel that it. Like it has a flow.

I want to achieve those specific things by this specific day. Now, the first Time you do this, the first few times, your estimate of how long it's going to take, you might be way off.

But if you practice setting that kind of deadline for yourself, you're going to get much better at predicting how long it's going to take you to get through the messy middle. And then you will be able to answer your own question of how long it will take you to learn this particular piece. So this is a very powerful technique as well. So think in terms of those results. You want to be able to play the piece through beginning to end. It can still be under tempo, because you can bring up the tempo. You get more familiar with it in the finish stage. So it can still be under tempo, but you want to be able to play it beginning to end. You want to have it sound musical, you want to have it have a pretty steady flow. And those are the big things you're looking for in that messy middle. Give yourself a date, a deadline, a due date, whatever you want to get that done. And then start thinking of your piece as in that finishing stage. This is largely a. A mental shift that you make, but you're going to be shifting even more as you shift into that finished stage. You're going to be shifting into more playing and less practicing. Your practicing will be about fixing those. Those potholes that come up as we continue to work and learn a piece. But you're not going to be practicing the piece as much. You're going to be playing it more and seeing how that goes. So that's how you manage the messy metal.

And then the third tip that I want to give you in this particular portion of our discussion is I want you to learn to set yourself up to learn faster. Now, the techniques that I just talked about, starting hands together, all those things will do that. They will help you set yourself up to learn faster. But there are other things you can do that aren't necessarily related directly to that. Practicing the piece that will help you do practice your technical drills, your exercises, all that sort of stuff. The stronger your technique is, the more your fingers will do what you want them to do when it comes to a piece. So keep strengthening your technique, keep strengthening your note reading, your sight reading. This is such a key skill. When you read well, you learn faster. So you can use that sight reading time. You know, just do a little bit of sight reading. Bring out a little piece to sight read on a regular basis. I know I just threw another thing into your practice rotation. That's okay, it's good for you. But bring out Those reading skills. And then the third thing I would do in this little section, you know, if you're setting yourself up to learn faster. A strong technique, yes. Strong reading skills, yes. But this particular attitude will help you a lot too, and that's learning to fail faster.

Push yourself further than you think. Take the tempo further, faster. If your piece needs to go fast, don't, you know, don't inch your way up. Let yourself experience what that's going to be like. It's okay if it's messy. This is what practice is for. Let yourself fail faster. That will speed up your learning immensely. So at this point, we have talked about six of the techniques that I really wanted to share with you. We've talked about those three ways to manage your practice time. The clock management, knowing when to stop, rotation to choose your priority. We've talked about how to manage your learning time for a piece by speeding up the beginning stage and managing the messy middle and setting yourself up to learn faster. But the last thing I want to talk about today is sort of the fun one, and that's to know how you work best and to consider that learning style thing. I alluded to it a little bit before when we were choosing those different practice plans and those different rotation ideas. But it's really important to know how you work best and then to let yourself do that. So much of the time, our efforts at self improvement fight our natural tendencies and those are the things that never work for us. Those are the New Year's resolutions that we break. Those are the goals we don't achieve. Those are the sort of, you know, broken schedule things like, oh, I tell myself I'm going to do this at a certain time every day and then, you know, what do you know? I don't do it. So knowing how you work and then just letting yourself work the way you like to work is really key. Now, quite a while ago, I did a blog post on comparing two different learning styles. And I gave them the names of German shepherds and greyhounds. The German shepherds are the kinds that they like to have a plan. They like to follow the rules, tell them what they're supposed to do, and they're going to do it and they're going to do it right. Then there are the greyhounds who are the first fast starters. They love to get out there and just run through stuff and do lots of things and play lots of different pieces, and they just, they, they go for it. Now, each one of these learning styles has some weaknesses associated with it, but they're both good and they're both wonderful. To be able to work with organization, focus and dedication like the German shepherds, to be able to enjoy the lightning speed and the, and just the fun that the greyhounds have. They're both wonderful. And so I did that blog post and then for the very, very first episode of the podcast, I embellished a little bit on that and I added a third learning style, the one I called the beagles. These are the distractible types. Oh, that's another new piece. Oh, there's another. Oh, I could do that. Oh, let me do this. And they're the ones that like to set their plans, but they like to change their plans. They like the variety, they like the new things. Nothing wrong with that either. I love beagles. So in any case, that's the way I identified these three learning styles. And if you want to read more about them, it's, you know, it's light hearted, hardly scientific, but I think you might recognize yourself in one of these breeds. You can read the original blog post and, or you could listen to the podcast episode and I've put links to both of those in the show notes for this episode so you can find them easily. But here's how we can apply these time management strategies to the different learning styles just very quickly. Once again, not scientific, but you know who you are. If you're a German shepherd, you know it. If you're a greyhound, you know it. If you're a beagle, you know it. And you've already probably identified, at least in the back of your mind, which one of these would feel comfortable to you, and you've probably rejected it, saying, well, okay, so I should probably do the one that's hard because that's the one that's going to be better for me. Ah, don't do that. You can do the one that feels good because you're going to do that. Any one of these strategies, these time management strategies we talked about, they're all good, they're all going to work. So choose the one that feels the best to you, not the one that feels the worst. So for instance, if you are a German shepherd, let's go with the clock management. You love your plan, you're going to set that plan, but I want to be sure that you know when to stop so that you don't keep practicing something until it's absolutely right before you go on to the next thing. Clock management might be the way for you to go, but you might really enjoy the rotation. Setting out that elaborate plan and Then working that plan that might feel really good for you. So go with the one that feels good. Or greyhounds. You like to work fast. You might really enjoy the rotation too because you could sort of time chunk it and you could get through a lot of things quickly. Oh, no need to spend more time at that. I'm just rolling right through. And so the rotation plan might really, really work for you. Or perhaps you might decide to try the choosing your priority for the day and do just a little bit more focus. You could try that too. But I'll bet you'll like the rotation. Beagles, the rotation is you, right? This is the one you love. You just want a lot of different stuff to do. You're not going to focus on one thing for very long. You might, but you know, you might enjoy that choosing a priority for a day, but you know that you want to get to everything else, but you just lose track of what it is you want to get to. So here's an easy way to help yourself with that so that even if you're working the rotation schedule that you love, this will help you deal with that. Have all the pieces that you're working on, all the books you need on your music stand and take everything else off. Put it away out of sight so that it doesn't distract you just by its very presence. Put it out of sight. Have everything you need on your music stand and then as you play it, put it to the back of the pile so that whenever you come to your music stand next, you know what you're going to do next because it's right there and you can play it and you'll get to everything. It's pretty simple, pretty beagle proof. So it's something you can enjoy and still something that'll help you make a little bit of progress. So let's just quickly review those seven ways. Right Clock management rotation plan, choosing your priority for a day. We talked about how to speed up the beginning stage of learning a piece, how to manage that middle and how to set yourself up to learn a little bit faster. Plus, as we've talked about all these techniques, know how you work best and indulge it smartly. Right? You want to be intelligent about it, indulge it, but with a little bit of a little bit of a plan behind it. Okay, one more quick reminder that you can still join us for our hub challenge, the 2024 HARP Happiness Challenge over at the Heart Mastery Hub Link to join that is in the show notes or you'll find the link to Join the hub@harpmastery.com either way, we'd be happy to have you there. It's a lot of fun to see what's giving people harp happiness at the moment, so that's a lot of fun and you can please join us if you will. Next week we'll be talking about arpeggios and I'll be giving you a special arpeggio drill that should give you give you something to work on. So if you need to add some technique stuff to your practice, you'll get that next week, I promise. All right, so that is all happening next week. In the meantime, remember that every day is a day you can add more harp happiness to the universe, to your world, and to your spirit. And all you have to do is play. Thanks so much for listening and I'll see you next time.

Thanks for tuning into another episode of the Practicing Harp Happiness podcast. I release a new episode every Monday morning so you can hit your practice week running. Until then, remember to practice your harp happiness every day. See you next time.