When I started learning violin I found that it was hard to establish a practice habit, and without that, it was hard to make progress in my playing. In order to overcome that I made it a ‘rule’ that I did not have to practice violin 30 minutes or 60 minutes or 2 hours, or 4 hours, all of which are reasonable but on some days intimidating. I made the rule I had to pick up my violin every day. It didn’t matter if I only did 30 seconds of scales and walked away. An every day practice was my starting goal. What I found was that this highly achievable goal made it possible to do. Most of my barrier was in the momentum to pick up and tune the violin. It is true that some days that is almost all I did, but in truth most days I did more. Far more.
Up until now in my blog you may have noticed that the blog posts have been about once per month. Occasionally twice in a month, but just as often not at all for some months. The average as I said, has been once per month. In an attempt to try to increase my blogging output/writing habit I have decided to put my violin experiment to the test here. I will try and write every day for 21 days straight, with at least half of those being blog entries.
Like the violin experiment this may result in a few blog posts that are only a few lines long. I apologize for that. The goal however is to try and make this more of a regular habit. Will I blog every day forever? No. The goal is to get to a consistent twice a month. However, given we all struggle with developing writing habits, I thought I would share this expereiment ‘live’. Wish me luck, bare with me. And if you have better or more efficient ways of developing such habits, please let me know in the comments!
Gideon Smith 