Day Five - Organizing Life

I don't practice enough. I'm just going to say it. I wish I could practice for three hours, but that's just not how I trained myself. I never really enjoyed practicing, unless it was for something I personally was interested in.

But, after a bad lesson on Monday (not your fault, Jake), I decided I need to get on my horse and practice more. A lot more. But I couldn't really decide how.

Before today, I couldn't ever really decide what to do with my 5 hours I have in between class in the morning and tango on Tuesdays. Usually it ends up being lunch, google something.... facebook... mess around on Sibelius... oh crap it's 5 o'clock. But today I tried something different.

I got done with lunch at 12:30, and sat down at my computer to decide what I really needed to get done that day. Two hours of practice, learn 30 measures of marimba solo, gym, library, dance class, study group, write this. I always go the the gym at 11, cuz no one's on my stationary bike, dance class is at 5 and study group is at 6:45. So that leaves at least two one hours blocks of time for snare and mallet practice, and a half hour somewhere to learn my solo.

And guess what? I got it all done. I scheduled my day and took a nap til 3, ran to the library, practiced and learn my solo for an hour, went to dance class, study group, learned snare stuff for an hour, went to the gym (with my snare books, haha), and now I'm writing this. Mission accomplished. Check marks all around.

I found out that if you don't have a plan for something, a specific set of goals or benchmarks for the things you want to accomplish, it's much less likely to ever happen. Now, this doesn't mean, when you're trying to relax, think about how you're going to relax. That's against the point. And sure, I guess you can get a little neurotic about it and map your day out to the minute, but that's not necessary.

Set goals for the day, set goals for the week, and find certain times of day you can do things every day. Find whatever helps you get things done when you need to get things done, and do them.

You are the best motivation you can ever have. You can only become what you work hard to be.

M