Habit Cues: When is it Time to Practice?

The first part of a habit is the cue. If your plan is to practice without a cue in place, then every day you would have to say, “Hey, you know what would be fun? Practicing that thing that’s really hard for me right now. It’s a beast, but it sure beats watching the rest of this cartoon I like.” (Or similarly if you were a runner, “Hanging out with my friends right now is pretty fun. But I think I’ll say goodbye so I can run until my legs are burning and my sides ache.”)

In my experience, both as a teacher and as a practicer, the more free time you have, the less likely you are to practice diligently. The lack of structure takes away your habit cues, and you end up getting less done instead of more. Also the lack of urgency lulls you into apathy. (“I don’t need to practice right now because I have all day.”) If this is the case, then my advice would be to make it your top priority to schedule each day the night before.

Now for the good stuff. There are five different types of habit cues:

• Time of Day
• Preceding Action
• Location
• Emotional State
• Other People

You only need one cue for a habit. But the more you can engage in, the better. For our practice habit, I say let’s go with the first three. You don’t want your practice habit to depend on the ups and downs of your emotions. And you don’t want to wait for other people to nag you into practicing. Unless of course you’re still a kid. Then you’ll need a parent to help you practice.

TIME OF DAY

Set a timer for a certain time each day. Plenty of people do this to catch their favorite TV show. Now you can do it for violin. As a freelancer, my schedule isn’t stable enough for me to put this on autopilot. Instead I have a habit of scheduling my day. It’s then that I pick my practice times and set up an alarm on my phone.

PRECEDING ACTION

Find another activity to cue you into when it’s time to practice. Try a morning scale routine, for example. First thing when you wake up, go into the practice room and play scales for half an hour. Or take out your violin first thing when you come home from school. Or after you’ve cleared the dinner table. It’s important that you don’t add any “in between” time between the two actions. If you clear the table, and then do a quick check of your social media, you’ve already lost. You have other habits built around opening that browser, and they’ll drag you away from the practice room.

LOCATION

Location can be a trickier cue. Some writers built writing sheds. They would go to their shed, shut out the world, and write. I do have a dedicated practice room. But I never wander in and say, “Oh hey, look where I am. Maybe I’ll practice.” So the practice room isn’t my cue to start practicing. But it’s a great cue for me to focus on the work once I’m there. This brings up another point about how to build an ideal practice space, free of distractions. But that will be a post for another time.

For now, let’s move on to talking about the final element of a strong habit: the Reward.