Again, with the caveat that I am a decent amateur runner and a professional (for what that’s worth) pianist, learning a piece of music is so much more nuanced than running a race. As one example: I can’t pick which section of music to work on if I haven’t played through and come to a general understanding of the piece as a whole. So I’m fearing that my training/practice program has to be much more tailored and specific, which might detract from the simplicity and lack of choice that I was striving for.
Focused, productive practice for 25 minutes is really easy for me. I get a lot done, and, also, I feel like I haven’t gotten nearly enough done! But I kind of love that I’m limiting myself for the first week. I know that I have plenty of scheduled hours, so the consistency and the excitement for each practice session is really pretty thrilling. Doing two days of an hour and a half would actually be easier than 6 days of a half hour each, but less productive. Working up to 6 days of 2-3 hours will be great though. See, each practice session I’ve started working on what I was scheduled to do, but then very quickly realize something else that really would be productive work. I’ve kept to the schedule, (actually, I did cheat one day and did some extra work), but I’m definitely struggling with ideas of flexibility vs. consistency/no choices.
With age and lots of teaching, I’ve gotten extremely good at figuring out efficient and effective ways to practice. What I need is to couple the excitement of having a clear and useful idea, with the action to realize it.