What if I told you that you could double your practice efficiency overnight without adding hours to your practice? Does this sound like a too-good-to-be-true infomercial? That anxious feeling of just needing a couple more days to polish a harp part is something that has haunted every harpist at some point. Believe it or not, there is a solution to that perpetual feeling of “needing more time,” and it is hiding within the organization of your practice routine itself. Whether your routine is one hour or six hours at the harp, that time can be adjusted proportionally so the pieces move through your practice schedule based on their stage of learning rather than their urgency in your concert calendar.

By ranking your current harp-related projects, you can see which ones should demand the bulk of your practice time.

Let’s face it, we are creatures of habit, and I am the first to admit it. For 30 years I have started with the same warm up. (Yay, Larivière!) But the important thing is not what you warm up with, but what you do after your warmup. Do you go first to your most important project that aligns with your long-term goals or do you turn to your most urgent project with a quickly approaching deadline? Using the time-management concept called Eisenhower’s Principle, we can rank our projects based on their importance and urgency. On this list, number one is high priority and number four is low priority:

1. Important and urgent: These projects are related to your greater harp goals and have a looming deadline;
2. Important but not urgent: These projects are related to your harp goals but have an open-ended timeframe;
3. Urgent but not important: These tasks can get in the way of achieving your harp goals because they take time away from numbers one and two, so try to solve these before they become urgent or reschedule them so you can focus on numbers one and two;
4. Not important and not urgent: Mostly, these are distractions (Facebook, anyone?) so deal with them after you are finished practicing. For example, getting your car washed or commenting on your friend’s amazing vacation photos can wait.

Using this scale, consider some projects you might have on your music stand in these post-holiday winter months and rank them using Eisenhower’s Principle. For example:

• Pieces for an open-ended debut recording project with your duo partner (#2: important but not urgent);
• A prominent orchestra part with solos. Rehearsals start next week, and they contracted you last month but just sent the music today (#1: important and urgent);
• A memorized solo recital performance in April (#2: important and not urgent, but keep in mind this could become urgent if you do not start the memory ASAP);
• Order spare harp strings before next week (#3: urgent but not important—because it is a necessity, but doesn’t necessarily further your larger harp goals);
• Your next lesson, in which your teacher expects to hear a piece up-to-tempo (#1: important and urgent).

By ranking your current harp-related projects, you can see which ones should demand the bulk of your practice time (those with a #1 and #2 ranking). It is critical that you get to those projects every day until completion. Notice that memory work certainly falls into that “important” category. More on that in a minute.

When I was a young student I was constantly rationalizing my practice time to myself by saying, “I’ll have more time to learn that piece after I finish this piece.” I preferred to work on one piece at a time, so I was constantly trying to make practice a linear process, and I was frustrated when it seemed that I was always running out of time to perfect and memorize. Years later, during my doctoral studies, Susann McDonald shared a method of practice organization based on one fundamental rule: You must give yourself permission to move on to the next task in your practice, even if you feel there is still work to be done. This makes a lot of sense because let’s face it, there is always more work to be done and there are always more pieces to learn.

Work through your repertoire using the practice blocks shown to the left based on the stages of learning: new notes, familiarizing, memorization, and maintenance. Blocks can be repeated as necessary and can be proportional to fit each segment of your practice. If you’re practicing for two hours, each block would be about 30 minutes followed by a break; if you’re practicing for four hours, each block would be about 60 minutes followed by a break. If more time is needed for a particular stage, the blocks could move up or down on the list. For example, if you aren’t memorizing much music but have a lot of new notes, everything shifts up on the below list to make more space for new notes. If you have a lot of music at the pre-memory/familiarizing stage, then all of block two could be used. Careful not to skip the breaks—they are important in order to provide time for your brain to “digest” the information in each block.

Note that the practice block order stays the same while each of your pieces moves to a different block in your practice schedule. This allows you to work on several pieces at the same time or a large piece, which is in different stages of learning.

Memory is the first task because it demands the greatest amount of attention and clear focus. In contrast, the new notes block involves a lot of writing and working things out, and less musical work, so this task can be completed when you are more mentally and physically fatigued at the end of the practice. Ideally each of these activities should be part of your practice routine every day. If you memorize a bit each day rather than cramming, you will become better at that skill. If you work on reading new music every day, your reading skills will improve. If you always have something that you are maintaining then there is less chance that you will be caught in a panic when an important performance opportunity comes up. Rather than chasing deadlines with panic, your practice organization holds the key to greater efficiency and sessions which are more pleasant and productive. •