Getting distracted: what to do?

I wish I had an answer for getting distracted.  I'm not one of those people who have problems practicing - or at least I didn't think I was.  Guitar for me is something I look forward to, not something I feel I should make myself do.  Mostly anyway.  Although I don't make rapid progress, I assume I am moving ahead slowly, although I have had to resign myself to the fact that it will take a while, whatever "it" is.  How slowly? there's one passage I've been working on that my fingers just don't want to reach cleanly, but over the weeks (no, months) since I started, I'm finally getting it. No problem - eventually I hope to add it to my repertoire but there's no rush.

However over the last couple of weeks I figured I had some preparation to do - both for the start of orchestra rehearsals and for recommencing regular lessons.  Time to get down to business!   I wrote in my handy log book some goals for the week - restricting the number of items on the list so I could concentrate better (and hopefully make some progress before I was put on the spot).  So now the list merely had a few warm up exercises, an exercise given to me by my teacher to "help me learn where the notes are"! (ouch),  a list of orchestra pieces I have to learn over the next several weeks, and section of a recent piece where I need to revamp the fingering on so as not to miss out the ends of the arpeggios.   So far so good...

As the week went on I noticed that the list was getting longer.  How did that happen? Well, when I worked on something not originally on the list (I mean really worked on it - not just playing for fun)  I added it to the list  and gave it a little check mark.  Day by day the list was getting longer, check marks were being added, but painfully few next to the original list items.   Hmmm.  Turns out despite my best intentions, I was actually mostly ignoring the things that needed to get done in favor of things I felt like working on.  There in front of me on the log was the proof - I had probably spent less than half the time on my urgent list items. And what was this I added? "practice flute" ??   Not likely to do a lot for my guitar playing!

My log has thus identified one factor that could be contributing to lack of results - I'm not actually spending much time on the things that I'm using to measure progress!   I do think I'm doing better at "practicing" rather than playing mindlessly -  just not focusing on immediate goals.   So this leads to the next question: if the whole reason for learning guitar is to have fun, do I need to change the way I do things?  I'm doing it to have fun, but part of the enjoyment is the sense of accomplishment from tackling more adventurous pieces successfully...  On the other hand, turning it into work doesn't do it either.  This summer I had a brief period where I focused exclusively on technique to the exclusion of having fun, and I fairly quickly found myself inventing reasons not to pick up the guitar.  Gosh I hope  there's a happy medium.    Maybe I'll try to limit working on additional list items to just one time per day and see how that goes... stay tuned!