12Jan2023 - I spent the month of December playing old and new songs and did not spend much time on the module 15 exercises. My loose practice schedule resulted in fun but I felt some frustration with the progress in Grade 3, so I spent a week refining my overly complicated 3 day practice schedule proposed on Nov. 20.
I realized several things:
1 - I need to include some time blocking in my routine to keep me on track with technical exercises.
2 - Having the same routine every day is tiresome to me and doesn’t allow for enough flexibility.
3 - When I worked on new songs, that tended to take up all remaining time as songs become more challenging.
So my answer is to split the 1 hour practice schedule into 2 x 30 min. routines with a 10 min. warmup for 2 days. I preceded with 1 day with a 10 min. warmup and 30 minute practice session for learning new songs and/or recording.
Here are the routines that I have worked out for Grade 3 Module 15 and Module 16:
For maximum variety you can do the first 3 days on acoustic and repeat for 3 more days with electric guitar and the 7th day can be whatever you want or just rest your fingers.
If you need to work more on new songs or recordings you can repeat day 1 after day 2 and then day 1 after day 3 and repeat day 3, followed by day 1. Day 3 has most of the exercises specific to the modules and you have exercises every other day:
Day 1-songs, 2-exercises, 3-songs, 4-exercises, 5-songs, 6-exercises and day 7 whatever. I will probably follow this schedule of alternating more flexible days with more structured days until I get caught up with the Grade 2 consolidation items identified earlier and reduce my backlog of songs to record.
As you can see, this organization of the practice routine provides a lot more flexibility and works within a 40 min. practice time constraint. I’ll try this for a few weeks and see if it needs more tweaking.