Instructional sites are full of advice about using practice goals: "Set a goal for every practice session"; "clearly state your short-, medium- , and long-term goals"; "work out your long term goals and work backwards to schedule the work towards them", "list your goals on practice log and mark off how many times you work on them"; "break your goals down into small bite-sized chunks"; "Make your goals so that your practice can always end on success"; "if you can't achieve your goal, make it smaller, go slower!" And the list goes on. But there are some things that involve a shift in mindset, a difficult new technique, or more flexibility or strength that will take weeks or months for the penny to drop -- how do you have goals for those? I've been thinking about this while I've been sweating my way through one painful measure at a time of a Bach piece - each measure taking me days to figure out and make my fingers do it (and then I promptly forget and have to go over it again). Yes I can break it down into smaller goals (figure out which notes need to be damped, work out the fingering that allows me to do it, practice at a speed that will allow me to do it, figure out which notes need to be emphasized, etc) But there is so little progress in a given practice session that it's hard to feel like it was successful. And you know what? You really do need a little success to encourage you to keep plugging away at it!
So is there another way to approach this? I had the same realization when I made myself practice sight-reading. In my case I don't see any obvious progress from day to day or even week to week. So I set myself a goal of working my way through sight reading materials every day, the goal being to do it for 15 minutes. Once the need to achieve a perfect read-through was taken away, I found it much more fun to do it, and often the 15 minutes stretched to 30 minutes. And after a while there WAS progress - but it crept up so slowly I didn't notice it (but when I did, there was a real sense of achievement!) The secret there seems to be just to put the time in, and when enough incremental progress has been made that there is finally an achievable goal, then, and only then, set the goal.
Even though I wrote this down, I still had a hard time making myself practice the Bach - a week went by while I ignored it, Today it was almost back to square one. However just like parking a thumb on the string and thumb damping, I'm hopeful it will eventually click. In the meantime, I'll just practice a measure for 15 minutes at a time and see what happens...
