If you’ve used any learning, practicing, or productivity app, you’re familiar with two concepts: streak and time-tracking. Streak helps you develop consistency while time-tracking gives you a sense of accomplishment.
But there’s a dark side. You may feel compelled to put in your practice on a day where you should take a break just to keep the streak, or you may go through the motions when you’re no longer productive just to have a higher number on your time-tracking stats board. None of these is healthy or helpful if your goal in the end is to make steady progress and enjoy the time you spend doing it.
A healthier but still fun way to track your practice
The Practice Observer in the Muse and Mate practice journal is our way of helping you develop consistency, feel accomplished and gain insights to your patterns without the unnecessary punishment.
On each page, there are 35 grids—one per day, enough to cover a month’s practice. In each grid, there is a circle split in half on the top, and three concentric circles at the bottom.
This grid is a meta summary of your day’s practice. When used purposefully, it can reveal a lot about your practice patterns which you can take into consideration when making plans.
How Practice Observer works
🧠 The top circle tracks whether you’ve planned and reflected your practice. This will leave you a visual record of how often you’ve planned and reflected on your practice. And if you’re an investigator type, you can see whether planning and reflecting made a difference in your practice over time. For example, I find that my practices are more productive when I plan ahead of time. You can find a deeper dive into planning and reflection in another post.
⏳ The bottom concentric circles are your “time tracker” with a personal, fun touch. Practice looks different for everyone. For an amateur musician who otherwise has a full-time job and other obligations, 30 minutes can be the maximum amount of time dedicated to practice, whereas for a music student, one hour of practice is a short session.
🖍️ Determine what a short, medium, and long practice means for you. Fill the different size of circles based on how long you practice. You may as well have fun with it by using a colored pen/pencil/crayon you like!
What's the point of all of this
Remember, your goal is to develop consistency and build healthy habits. If you can spare 5 minutes to warm up, color that tiny circle in — great. If life happens, you need a break, leave it blank — that’s ok too. There’s no streak to break, you are not back to Day 1 again, you just pick up the next day and everything is fine.
The real power of these filled circles is the insights you gain by observing your practice pattern.
Do you tend to practice less towards the end of the week? Maybe you’re more tired as the week goes by — this insight helps you readjust your expectations or your routine. Do you tend to practice for a really long time after a couple days of short practices? Maybe you feel you need to “make up” for the time — this insight helps you re-evaluate how to allocate your time so your practice is less sporadic.
Positive change always starts with awareness and insights. And this is what the Practice Observer is designed to do. If you can learn something about yourself and act on this knowledge, that’s time and effort well spent.
Ready to gain insights to your own practice?
Try the practice journal which not only gives you the ability to track your practice, gain insights to your practice patterns, but is filled with gentle reminders and prompts to help you practice more intentionally.