I like to record my piano practice hours. Its a big motivator for me because I can see my actual time spent at the piano over weeks and months. Looking at my table of practice hours helps me feel guilty about not practicing enough and then I figure out ways to fit more practice time into a busy schedule. In the past, I have typically practiced in one larger session instead of smaller sessions. Then, it was easy to enter my time into my computer because I also used my computer for reading my music during my practice. Lately, I've been trying something a bit new where I am not giving up on my "bigger" sitdown practice session, but I'm also trying to add in some "walk-by" practice sessions. A "walk-by" practice session is a shorter practice session, maybe 15 minutes or so where you literally walk by the piano and work on some little idea, like practicing the start of a piece by memory, or working on just one little difficult part in a piece, etc. During my "walk-by" practice session, I haven't been using my computer (because of the setup time) and so this practice time hasn't been incorporated into my practice time table. That's a problem because I want to give myself credit for absolutely all my time spent practicing.
Consequently, I've been trying out various time tracking apps to see if any of them would work for this purpose. I wanted something free (I like free) and easy to use, but I also wanted to access the data, so I could incorporate it into my practice log on my computer. I have eventually settled on the Toggl time tracking app. Its easy enough to use and you can subdivide your project like "piano practice" into different tasks such as technical work, improvisation, piece practice, etc. (In fact, I'm currently considering whether or not to record my practice time on individual pieces to see how many practice hours it takes me to bring the piece to a performance standard.) I have found that all of these apps are somewhat kludgy because they are designed for tracking billable time for clients, but Toggl has worked well enough for my purposes. In fact, its great that I don't need the paid upgrade to get the client reporting feature.
The app sends me a weekly email report which I then copy and paste into my practice log. I now log only the weekly instead of daily practice, but it seems like a reasonable trade-off for more accurate time tracking. I also like being able to log into the website to see my weekly hours in their different charts. Its nice being able to view the data on my computer instead of just my phone, sometimes the phone is just a bit small. One other important feature with Toggl is that once I start a task, I can easily edit the start and stop times. I find that feature extremely useful because sometimes I start a task and then remember that I'm supposed to be tracking my time, so I then just edit the start time (and sometimes the end time) and voilĂ .
Once I started on this "time tracking" idea, I've added more projects like "piano teaching" and sub-category tasks like lesson prep, piano teaching, and even piano blogging. Its been quite an eyeopener to have some actual data on how much time I spend on various tasks during the day. I find some tasks take quite a bit longer than I realized and others a lot less time. However, the most important thing is that I'm looking at the data and making decisions about how I spend my time and that makes me more productive. Of course, it also means that I am more addicted to my phone than ever.
I absolutely love this post. Toggl has changed not only my piano practice, but also my life. Highly recommended!
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