I know - that title is either an oxymoron, confusing, or perhaps both, but stay around and all will be explained... This week I was reminded of a different goal-setting technique (in Noa Kageyama's excellent e-newsletter). That is, when trying to set goals for a deadline, instead of starting from the current timepoint and working forward, start at the finish line and work backwards. What does this mean? Figure out the precise goal, and all the tasks that are required to accomplish that goal, then fit them into timepoints between now and then so they fit. (Actually I think the point of the exercise is to identify the tasks and schedule them - rather than actually working backwards, but I'm not quibbling*)I've done the goal-setting exercise before with my guitar practice and it works, kind of. But it usually falls by the wayside sooner rather than later, maybe because the goals aren't tied to a specific endpoint. As I seem to have a number of projects that are not making much progress, I thought I'd have a go at this technique for the next week or so.
First I had to identify specific goals and deadlines - believe it or not, that in itself was useful.
By Nov 12 (pm)
- Play the De Visee Prelude at the next online masterclass (part of Simon Powis' ClassicalGuitarAcademy) - probably November 12. There are a number of us working on it and it was suggested (at least half tongue in cheek) that we would all play the same thing!
- Learn part 2 of Adelita sufficient to play it v slowly
- Read through orchestra music from e.g. the Swan from Carnival of the Animals and identify any challenges to ask guitar teacher
- Finish working through sight reading practice exercises (8 remaining)
- Be able to play through Carcassi 7 (like this!) but cold @ 30 (super slow) with metronome on 8ths.
After identifying the goals and the deadlines, I then broke down what I had to do to get there. Though it would be tedious for you to read (so I won't list them here), it was extremely useful for me. For example, to get through the (so called) sight reading I found I had to assign myself more to do at the weekend, because it takes me such a long time (it's not really sight reading, it's more figuring out how to play it.) In contrast, the orchestra music was pretty simple - read through one piece a day and done! Learning Adelita involved breaking it down into sections and concentrating on one section a day. So far so good. The Prelude however - I've had it a while now, and though I've made progress on dynamics and keeping the voices separate and legato, I rarely if ever play it clean. I decided I needed to break it down into sections and apply the super-slow approach till I could play each section without errors 4x. Started this at the weekend, and I found 7 things I needed to do differently. Wow.
So in summary, what did I get out of this and is it worth continuing?
- Assigning a specific goal to a deadline (even 'fake' deadlines can help!) made things seem achievable as opposed to nebulous 'in the future' kind of goals.
- Thinking about what was needed to reach the goal resulted in me trying new things (for instance applying the super-slow technique to iron out the problems in the Prelude) - more on using your head instead of just trying harder
- Having only a small subtask to do each day (and then you're done!) made it much easier to actually do, and is well-known as helping to achieve larger goals.
- I got a sense of satisfaction from achieving the smaller tasks
- Even if some of the deadlines prove unrealistic, the information I got from trying will help me set more realistic deadlines in future. Adjusting goals is an important skill in project management.
As for whether I reached any of my goals - that will remain to be seen!
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