In a recent article I mentioned how the pandemic has screwed up a lot of people’s routines and schedules, especially in relation to voice and music. For others it has introduced the space to build a vocal practice routine. Yet for many people in the modern world, carving out and sticking to a regular routine in anything doesn’t come naturally.
The writer James Clear talks about how building a new habit into your life can take anywhere from 18 days to 254 days to establish. It takes time, and building sustainable habit is the key to this.
Today, I wanted to talk about the easiest way I’ve found to build a practice routine for yourself, why it’s important, and the mindset involved.
Quick disclaimer: this assumes you have some vocalises (voice exercises) that are appropriate for your voice. If you’re just jamming some random exercises, stuff you’ve seen on Youtube, or you’re trying to imitate my own vocal routine that I’ve talked about – you will almost certainly be causing more problems than you’re solving.
If I had to sum up the essence of building a sustainable habit for practice routines, I’d summarise it as:
Regular practice times, but make the schedule ludicrously achievable
To get better at anything, we need to be immersed in it regularly. Anders Ericsson describes it as deliberate practice. We need to be working on the right things, but we also need to have focus when we do it. That requires us to set aside regular practice times, but we need to make them short enough and frequent enough that we do it and stay focused during the practice.
It’s a marathon, not a sprint
Most people, when starting anything new or even just trying to “get back on the horse” when they’ve fallen out of a habit, is that they set impossible standards for themselves. They tend to bite off far more than they can chew, go at it hard for a few days, a week even, then realise they’ve not stuck to it for a few days and self-flagellate. Failure was almost inevitable with this mindset.
Example: How many folks do you know who have signed up for the gym, gone 6 days in a row every week for TWO whole weeks… then burned out and given up. It’s a well known modern tale, and typifies the standard problem with modern thinking – we don’t fully appreciate that in any serious endeavour we’ve got to see it as a marathon, not a sprint.
First session advice
The advice I give most people in the first session is to follow along with the session recording, every other day, as if I was in the room with them. They can also break it up into 10/15 minute chunks and spread it out over a day or two. If their voices are sufficiently strong, or they are enjoying it, they can do it two days on, one day off (rest matters too).
Some people tend to think “I can fit that in, no problem“, then discover they’ve gone a few days without even thinking about it, let alone doing it.
Truth: setting aside an hour to work solidly on ANYTHING is hard.
The reality is, even for lightly busy people, cultivating a practice routine or habit for ANY skill they want to learn isn’t easy. Skill acquisition is actually a skill in itself – the writers Tim Ferriss and Josh Waitzkin are big on this.
The ability to acquire a new skill, build a sustainable practice habit of the right things, in a way that fits in with your personality and schedule, is fundamentally a skill in itself.
Steps to building a basic practice routine
1. Pick a practice duration that feels ludicrously short to you – 20-30 minutes is a good general duration, but for those finding it hard to establish a routine, 5-10 minutes is a good starting point. Literally everyone has this amount of time to hand in the day, no matter what we tell ourselves, and it is a matter of self-discipline whether it happens.
2. Put your practice time in your diary and stick to it – If we’re doing 5-10 minutes, try doing it once in the morning, once sometime after lunch, three times a week. You can pick your favourite 20 minutes of a given lesson/set of exercises, and spread them out over this combined time. This adds up to about 1 hour spread over a whole week.
If we start finding reasons why practice didn’t happen, this means we’ve bitten off more than we can chew. Revisit step 1 or even where things are scheduled in your diary.
3. After 1 week of following the routine, try adding just one extra thing into the practice routine that you enjoy – For example, this could be an extra song, another exercise, another round of the exercises that felt best. Whatever feels good, do it again. You could even consider doing an extra day of practice, if you feel so inclined. But don’t overdo it – make it ludicrously achievable.
Again, this assumes you’re following a routine that is selected as appropriate for your voice.
4. After another successful week, add another extra thing into the practice routine. Make it feel easy to do, don’t bite off more than you can chew.
Here’s the trick
When we enjoy things, time disappears on us.
At first, any new routine can feel like a slog, but we have to start somewhere. And by starting with a ludicrously achievable routine of even just 5-10 minutes every other day, and then adding things that we enjoy, we can naturally extend your practice routine with no real difficulty, because of said enjoyment. The shorter your original routine was, the longer your routine will have become, proportionally speaking.
This process should have taken about 3 weeks. It’s totally OK to spend longer on specific steps, tweak the regularity or duration as you need, as the goal is to make this very naturally easy to get into. After you’ve established a routine, you could go through those steps again and extend the routine still further.
You may find that in some busy weeks you need to slim down the practice routine just to fit it in. I certainly have weeks like that. While I can easily spend 4-5 hours working on my voice, some weeks I ONLY have 5-10 minutes each day I can dedicate to getting my voice firing and working correctly.
Remember, it’s a marathon, not a sprint – just keep moving at a pace that’s manageable for you.