Practice vs. playing classical guitar - my attempts at goal setting

I've never much thought about how to practice the guitar.  I've read about methods to make yourself practice, but I don't have that problem:  playing guitar is for relaxation and pleasure, a way to destress and take my mind off troubles, a way to get into 'flow.'  I play a lot in the gaps around work, eating and sleeping.  Sometimes instead of sleeping!  But wait, I read that practice is different from playing...  practice is goal-oriented, deliberate, requires metrics, logs and concentration, whereas playing is - well - just playing. Maybe even a waste of good practice time....   Excuse me?  that's beginning to sound like work!   I'm accustomed to just sitting down with the guitar and working on whatever I feel like at the moment,  or whatever is most pressing (like something for a lesson that's coming up). Though come to think of it maybe I am feeling that progress has stalled a little recently.  I seem to be having the same old problems with the same old things.  Maybe it is time to change things up a bit.

I'm not one of those people who obsessively logs progress. My other half takes his gps watch and plots speed, course and duration for every training run. He even has a waterproof watch to log laps in the pool and how many strokes per lap.   He has a spreadsheet with his progress over the last week, month year, and I've known him cancel a run when he can't find his Garmin - presumably because if he didn't log it, it didn't happen.  For me, just thinking about all that work makes me want to lie in bed and watch reruns of Downton Abbey.  However there is a lot of research indicating that setting concrete goals accelerates progress - (as a totally unrelated aside, my sister in law reminds me that concrete and cement are not one and the same).  So with lessons from my regular teacher on vacation, I decided to dip my toe in the water of goal-setting.

I started off by figuring out what I would like to accomplish over the summer. Naturally I would like to become a better guitar player, but that's like wanting to cure cancer: too big and too vague.  So I thought about some goals over the next few months and next year.  I tried to have a general goal, and then break it down into smaller specific goals.
1.  Improve sight reading -  a solid goal would be to the same level as would be required as the pieces I play.  My guitar teacher tells me this is not a short term goal but will take many months of daily practice.  He's the eternal optimist, whereas my cup is usually half empty, so I figure it will take me a year or more.
2. Learn to position-play.

I figured these 2 goals are interrelated.  I evaluated a number of resources aimed at sight reading and decided that the essence of sight reading was solid position playing.  Until I could do that, there was little chance of improving beyond the beginner level with sight reading because I was spending too much time trying to find the notes.  The book I came across that seemed the most logical to address that issue was 'progressive reading for guitarists' by Stephen Dodgson and Hector Quine.  Unlike other resources, it actually starts in position V, and at the beginning sticks strictly to one finger for one fret.  I like that because when you are just starting, if your hand gets out of position for a stretch it's hard to get it back in place accurately.  Also it's much easier to keep your hand stable in V without also dealing with the added stretch of first position.  After V it moves to IV, then I and II then back up to the higher positions.  Along the way it has some pretty tricky rhythm reading exercises including 32ths.  ( I might have to make myself count out 1-e-and-a 2-e-and- a to figure them out....).  My goal: at least get through positions I-V by the end of the summer.

3. I would like to be able to play a piece I shelved a year ago because I couldn't move around fast enough to fret it.   Obviously just trying to go faster isn't cutting it, so I need to work on techniques relating to accuracy and speed. On the basis of some excellent advice,  I'm working on exercises designed to facilitate speed and shifting.  Once I get them down I'm going to put a metronome on them and work on gradually ramping them up.  What are my specific goals? This is a hard one to quantify because I don't know what's possible for me and how long it will take.  My original goal was to play that piece at a reasonable speed by the end of the summer, however I have a feeling it will take longer than that to acquire the skills.  So my new goal is to memorize it and play it cleanly by the end of the summer.  I figure I can work on ramping up speed over a longer period.

4. I need more pieces I can play from memory.  I play for dementia patients at a nursing home once a week, and although they always seem to appreciate what I play, I've already played all the things I remember several times!   It takes me a long time to learn new pieces, so I figured the best way to accomplish this goal is to bring back simple pieces I used to play and have forgotten. I'll stick with each one until I get it,  play it at the nursing home, then move on to another.  I just got "Lagrima" back, so now I'm working on "Sepia" by Thierry Tisserand.

5. I want to be able to perform in casual settings without the stress causing me to crash and burn.   Playing at the nursing home has helped but I still blank out at some point pretty much every time.  I figure this needs 2 approaches: more performance practice, and learning pieces using more than muscle memory. Unfortunately that's hard work.  i.e. learn the right hand separately, learn the left hand separately, learn it so you can play it starting at every measure, visualize playing it without the guitar....    The easiest one of these for me is learning pieces so I can start them at any point, so as a start I will apply this to new pieces and to the pieces I am "pulling back." So far as more performance practice goes: I resolve to continue to accept other opportunities to play informally and head out into the park weather permitting.  There's only so much I can make myself do....

6.  Continue to improve the pieces I have recently learned to a level I can perform them at the nursing home.  Currently that's my Vals Primavera piece.

7. Learn orchestra pieces for the Fall

Yikes that's a lot of goals.  No wonder I don't make much progress on any one of them.  A little triage is necessary.  My priorities at this point are the position playing and speed, because improving those will probably have a major impact on the rest of my playing.  The orchestra stuff can wait till later.

So I have a list I make at the beginning of every week in a little notebook I keep next to my guitar: at the beginning of the month it looked a bit like this.

                                 6/1    6/2    6/3    6/4    6/5    6/6    6/7
Warm up
RH exercises
LH exercises
Giuliani speed
Dodgson
Vals
NH singalong
NH Sepia
VL arpeggios
VL harmonics

I'm not logging how many minutes I practice or describing in detail what I worked on.  The goal is simply to tick off what I practice each day in the appropriate column.  I don't expect to practice everything every day, but I do intend to make sure nothing falls through the cracks. If there is a gap on a line one day, then I try to make sure I practice it the next day.  For the speed piece once I can play it without mistakes (mostly) I will put in the tempo.  Wish me luck!