My first serious encounter with burnout was as an undergraduate at the University of Southern California. In addition to the demands of my music coursework, I was also in the academic honors program. So on top of my music classes, chamber music and orchestra rehearsals, and the four hours of daily practice my teacher said he expected of me, I also had assignments like reading the entire Iliad in 2-3 weeks and writing long papers about it. Attempting to be a responsible student, I took my teachers at their word, putting in 4 hours of daily practice AND reading every word of the Iliad.

This was a grueling schedule, and, as you can imagine, I didn’t last long.

I vividly remember the moment it all came to a screeching halt: I was in the library at 3am, about to congratulate myself for finishing a paper, then remembering I had ANOTHER paper due the next day that I had barely started. I freaked out! NOTHING in my previous experience had prepared me to juggle this kind of workload!

When I asked my viola professor for suggestions about how to manage the music side of things, the advice I got was basically "you'll figure it out." This advice to “just go figure it out” was a trope I heard often as a music student, and I’ve come to associate it with the underpants gnomes from South Park:

Here's the musical version I made of this meme:

For more on how I think about getting from Phase 1 to Phase 3, read my series on the Hourglass Method of Learning Music

Of course, what it took me a long time to learn was that the savvy students in my honors classes weren’t reading every word of the Iliad (gasp!), or that the music students weren’t practicing every note of their orchestra music (double gasp!). Those students ALREADY knew there was more to do than was actually possible to accomplish in any given day, and they prioritized assignments or music according to their relative importance, letting things slide where they knew they could.

I continued through much of my 20's and 30's rarely ever feeling well prepared for most of the concerts I would play. COVID gave me space to think more about this stuff, so when I saw that my Fall 2021 was going to be particularly full of performances, I resolved to get more organized.

To combat my never-ending battle with taming my workflow (and perhaps a natural inclination towards laziness), I’ve always been a bit of a productivity nerd. Ok, maybe "a bit" is an understatement: I read David Allen's "Getting Things Done" (GTD to the initiated), while in college and made my own version of his system on my Palm Pilot. I have read MANY books that promise to help you get your life/work organized, but it wasn’t until I became acquainted with Cal Newport's work that I found a system that worked for me. The system that I share below is basically my own take on his multi-scale planning model, adapted for musicians.

The Model

My method involves having a practice plan for a long chunk of time. Since I'm in academia, I divide my plans into semesters, so I have a large scale plan for Fall, Spring and Summer. Your plan should be adapted for your personal situation - it may make more sense to have quarterly plans, or month long plans if you’re a freelancer and things are changing frequently.

Regardless, the idea is to have a big picture plan which informs your week-to-week plan, which in turn informs your daily plans. You will deviate from your plans, and that's fine! The idea is to always have an intention for your time, and to iterate and adapt your plan as you learn what is and isn't possible for you to achieve in any given time. Operating with this intention, even if you sometimes fail to accomplish your plan, will always beat living in "putting-out-fires" mode. One too many fires and you're literally burned out!

My method consists of four basic steps:

Collect
Process & Prioritize
Schedule
Iterate & Adapt

Or you can remember the catchy acronym - CPPSIA! (note to self: work on that…)

Step One - Collect

In this step you should determine ALL the rep you have to play for a given time period, as well as the concert date(s) for each piece. Laying out all the repertoire you have to learn may be daunting, but it's critical to get a lay of the land!

In the chart below I've divided this into solo and chamber works, but you could do it all as one list, or add different categories depending on your situation.

At this point I also put in my "first rehearsal" date. Whether it's a solo, chamber or orchestral piece, by the first rehearsal I want to be out of the note-learning phase, and at least to the point of ironing out details. Ideally, at that first rehearsal I want to feel like I'm in a place where I could easily perform the piece, since running through a work is a pretty standard first rehearsal anyway! This is also important since most professionals only get 2-3 (or less) rehearsals on any given piece, and those rehearsals are usually just in the few days leading up to the performance. If I want to feel settled in a performance, I can't still be putting in fingerings and bowings two days beforehand! (It’s astonishing how long it took me to learn that!)

Step Two - Process & Prioritize

Practice time is limited, so it’s important to prioritize the music to practice based on how much prep time you think it will need. There were some pieces in the list below, like Faure's Apres une Reve, that I'd already performed so many times that I could do it in my sleep. Others on this list were new to me, but are easy enough to play that they required little preparation. Some pieces, like the Debussy Trio for Flute, Viola and Harp, I've performed a lot, but they are difficult enough that l know I will still need a fair amount of work to get them back up to speed. To help me process and prioritize repertoire, I came up with the following "rep prep key," then assigned each piece a number:

0 — never played, no notes learned
1 — partially learned notes
2 — learned all notes (or have performed a long time ago)
3 — have performed somewhat recently (or is relatively easy to learn)
4 — could play on a day's notice (or is sight-readable)

With each piece assigned a number, I can make a better estimate of how much time will be needed for any particular piece. To make an accurate assessment of how long a piece will take to learn requires some knowledge of the piece (like sight-reading it or listening to it), but also some self-knowledge about your own abilities to learn repertoire. In general, I find that my initial assessments of how much time I need to feel good about a piece are generally WILDLY ambitious - I usually need much more time than I first anticipate. This means this process usually needs to start earlier than a younger me would assume.

After assigning those numbers, I can make a rough estimate of when to START learning the piece. Since I generally make my weekly practice plans on Sunday nights, the "Start Date" I chose are the Mondays of any given calendar week. Once those dates have been decided they go in the chart too.

After going through steps 1 and 2, I ended up with a chart that looked like this:

Step Three - Schedule

Here's where the rubber meets the road. Once I've done this processing work, I'm ready to start scheduling my weekly practice. To do that I first make a chart for each month, then put each piece into the week I've assigned for its start date. At this point I also add more detail so that I can keep track of where a piece is in the learning process. When it comes to learning repertoire, I divide my time into three basic kinds of practice:

Finger/Bow (FB) = Phase 1 - this is for music I've never played before. It's the note-learning stage where I'm putting in fingerings and bowings. This stage is also important for identifying particularly troublesome passages that will take more time to marinate and settle.

Details (D) = Phase 2 - work on technical & musical details of challenging sections in more detail. Pieces with rep prep of 2-3 can often go straight into this category.

Review (R) = Phase 3 - practice performing! Play through sections/movements etc. Integrate work from details. If this is a "4" piece then I cut straight to this category of preparation (though I may still need to put in fingerings and bowings if it’s new).

At this point there's definitely some rejiggering of the original schedule that goes on, usually because I find that I have scheduled TOO many things to work on for any given week. But since I have everything in front of me, I can quickly make decisions about how to move things around to make a more balanced schedule.

Here’s what my initial weekly schedule looked like:

Step 4 - Iterate and Adapt

Sundays were my weekly review time. During that weekly review I went over my practice plan for the previous week to see if I needed to change anything in my monthly plans. Was there something I wanted to get to this week that I didn't? Did a particular movement need more practice time than I thought? Did I lose a day of practicing due to some administrative or family emergency? After making those adjustments I would make my plan for the coming week.

The important part here is to be flexible and kind to yourself! Just because your original plan didn't go the way you expected doesn't mean that you need to abandon the whole thing! It takes practice with this method to figure out what exactly you’re capable of accomplishing in any given week, and real life tends to interrupt at the most inconvenient times! My plan was far from perfect, but the things I had decided were important were much better prepared in performance than normal, which felt great!

But this takes too much Time!

I’m sure you're saying to yourself, "This takes too long and is too much work! I could just use this time to practice more!"

It does takes time to put something like this together! When I wrote out this plan last Fall I completed it in a couple of hours over a couple of days. But once I had it laid out, it only took a few minutes each week to revise it. And since I always knew what I should be working on during any given practice day, my resulting practice during this period was MUCH more focused and effective.

Using This Method With Students

In my experience it’s the rare student that comes in so organized that they’re able to handle all the music that’s thrown at them. Most are like I was as an undergraduate, they don’t have the tools to handle such a huge volume of notes, so it’s important to teach them skills for managing all this music! In the past few years, I’ve spent a good chunk of the first lesson of each semester sitting down with my college and advanced high school students to do this kind of planning with them. We’ll do it in a Google Doc that we both have access to, and periodically I can check the document to see if we’re staying on track with the timeline we established at the beginning of the semester. Especially for students doing a recital, I find it’s important for them to feel like they don’t have to cram all their practice into the last few weeks before the recital (even though some of them still need that deadline to kick into high gear!).

Some Final Disclaimers

Strict planning like this is important for busy situations, but as my wife (who is the ACTUAL organized one in our family) will tell you, I certainly don't walk around this organized all the time! In fact, if she's reading this right now I know she's thinking to herself, "What the heck is Travis doing giving other people advice on staying organized???" My summers are generally pretty relaxed, and I enjoy that seasonality - I think it's unrealistic, and frankly, unhealthy, to operate at a sprinting level of work for more than a month or two (which is generally what the end of my semesters look like). We aren’t machines, and we can’t expect to work like one!

Secondly, my particular method won't work for every situation. As a freelancer you may get called to sub for services an hour in advance (been there!)! As a student you probably won’t know all the repertoire you have to play at the beginning of the semester. But the loose framework outlined above CAN be adapted to almost any situation. The important part of this is to develop a SYSTEM that works for you. Simply by establishing some kind of system, you will likely appear extremely organized to your colleagues! As you adapt your system and see the benefits of it, you'll begin to trust it more and start to crave the peace and focus that comes when it's running.

Too many notes to learn? Avoid burnout with multi-scale planning