How to Practice Skills Effectively
If you want to improve at a skill, how you practice matters more than how much you practice.
When you learn a new skill, getting the basics down is easy. With a model to follow, a few practice tries, and some feedback, you can learn the basics of almost anything.
In the beginning, your improvement in a new skill is rapid. But after you’ve learned the “basics," more aimless repetition doesn’t do you much good. Lots of practicing won't exactly correlate to consistent improvements.
To make consistent improvement at a skill, you need to practice purposefully.
Purposeful practice is the foundation of effective skill development. All it requires is incremental adjustments to how you're currently practicing. With a few essential elements, you can start getting far more out of your practice time.
In this post, you’ll learn how to practice purposefully and get more out of your practice sessions for any skill.
Anders Ericsson’s Formula for Purposeful Practice
Thanks to research by psychologist Anders Ericsson, today, we know the ingredients for purposeful practice. These “ingredients” are simple, and anyone can apply them to their own practice.
According to Ericsson, purposeful practice must be “purposeful, thoughtful, and focused.” This means:
Your practice session should have well-defined goals. In each practice session, you must work towards specific and measurable goals that are just outside your current abilities.
You must be focused while practicing. You must give the task your full attention by modifying your environment to remove distractions and promote focused engagement in your practice.
You must receive and implement feedback. You must get objective feedback and continually use it to improve your performance.
Well-Defined Goals
Before you start practicing a skill, you should first set two kinds of goals:
A macro practice goal - This is the ultimate goal you are practicing towards. This goal can take weeks, months, or even years to reach.
Micro practice goals - These are the sub-goals you work towards in practice sessions. These usually take 1-3 practice sessions to reach.
Macro Practice Goals
Start by defining your macro goal.
Learning goals define what your future self will be able to do after you succeed with your practice. (See How to Learn Anything).
When creating your macro practice goal, ask yourself: What should I be able to do in the future after I’ve succeeded with my practice?
Define it and include one or two metrics when writing the goal. These metrics will give you an objective measure of your ability over time.
As a few examples:
If you’re a musician, your macro goal can be to perform a perform X piece at Y tempo with no wrong notes
If you’re a chess player, your macro goal can be to reach X rating
If you’re a runner, your macro goal can be to run a X distance in Y amount time
Baseline
The next step is to capture a baseline and determine where you currently are.
Take the metric in your macro learning goal and determine what your current ability is. Using the examples from above:
If you're a musician and want to perform X piece at Y tempo, determine the tempo you can currently perform the piece at
If you’re a chess player trying to reach X rating, find out what your current chess rating is
If you’re a runner trying to run X distance in Y time, you can check how long it takes you to run your target distance
Each learning goal will be unique, so take whatever metric you picked in your macro goal and see what you can currently do. Don’t worry if you’re nowhere close to your macro learning goal. Finding your true, current baseline allows you to determine the “gap” between your current ability and your macro practice goal. Using purposeful practice, you’ll close that gap over time.
Micro Practice Goals
Every practice session should work towards a micro practice goal. These goals should be just outside your current ability, and you should be able to reach them within 1-3 practice sessions.
Once you’ve determined the gap between your current ability (your baseline) and your macro practice goal, you can start creating micro practice goals by dividing your gap over the total time you have to practice. This should create smaller milestones to work towards every 1-3 practice sessions.
Achieving these micro practice goals allows you to achieve your macro practice goal incrementally over time.
Setting Appropriate Goals: Achieving Flow (and Avoiding Anxiety)
When we create macro learning goals for ourselves, we tend to be ambitious. This is a good thing. Our macro practice goals should be audacious and challenge what we can currently do.
When creating micro practice goals, take the opposite approach. Micro goals for individual practice sessions should be just outside our current ability. They should challenge us enough to stay engaged without becoming frustrated and overwhelmed.
To make our practice sustainable, we have to feel successful. Feeling successful is a key ingredient for staying consistent with your practicing. Enough challenge in a practice session brings us into a "flow" state. Too much challenge makes us resent our activity and immediately becomes unproductive.
The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi explains this dynamic in his book Flow. In it, he provides a model for balancing the optimal ratio of challenge to our current skill level:
Mental states in terms of challenge level and skill level, according to Csikszentmihalyi's flow model.
Based on Csikszentmihalyi’s model, goals that are too difficult for us promote a state of anxiety. That’s why the short-term challenges we place on ourselves should be just outside of our current ability. Specifically, we should be able to reach our sub-goals within 1-3 practice sessions. Over time, the incremental achievement of these sub-goals leads us to our macro goal.
Individual practice sessions should feel like playing a video game. With each successful repetition or attempt, we should feel like the micro practice goal is just within our reach.
Focus
The next component of purposeful practice is focus.
Instead of viewing focus as a mental ability, think of focus as a function of your environment.
Focus is a product of:
Deep engagement towards a specific learning goal (see above)
The absence of distractions
Periodization (the oscillation between stress and rest)
Remove Distractions from Your Environment
Achieving focus begins with removing distractions from your environment.
Start by identifying any common distractors that may disrupt your practice. Potential distractors can be:
Visual - This could be a push notification, something happening outside the window, other individuals in your environment, etc. Visual distractions include anything you can see that might draw your attention from your practice.
Auditory - This could include environmental sounds, what you’re listening to while you’re working, or anything that you can hear that might pull you away from your practicing.
Physical - This could include pets or children manding for your attention, haptic nudges on your smartwatch, the temperature in the room, how you’re sitting or standing, or anything physical that might disrupt your practicing.
Your practice environment should be absent of any of these common distractors. Create the ideal practice environment and keep it consistent for each session.
Intra-Session Periodization
Periodization is the alternation between stress and recovery.
If you’re exercising, this could be the short break you take between sets. If you’re a musician, it could be short five-minute breaks for every 30 minutes of practice.
Periodization allows you to disengage from the stressful activity of practicing and recover for the next one. Since you'll be stressing yourself during your practice sessions, periodization helps you decrease anxiety and frustration that may arise.
One common way of incorporating intra-session periodization is through the Pomodoro Technique.
With this technique, you alternate between practice periods of 25 minutes and rest periods of five minutes until you complete your practice session.
Research has shown that the ideal practice session is between 1-2 hours at a time, with short breaks taken periodically throughout. The ideal optimization will largely depend on the skill you are practicing, as well as your own mental state.
Experiment with different time periods of practice, each followed by a short break. Over time, you’ll find the ideal rhythm that works best for you.
Another important consideration is to step away from the activity once you notice you notice yourself getting anxious, stressed, or frustrated. When practicing begins to feel frustrating, it’s usually a sign that the micro goal you’re working towards is too far outside your ability, or, you need a break. Don’t be afraid to step away for a few minutes whenever you start to feel frustrated.
Get Feedback and Use it
The third and most important component of purposeful practice is feedback. Feedback is the foundation of all learning. Without feedback, none of us can know if what we’re doing is right or wrong.
When you’re practicing, there are different types of feedback you can collect to aid you in your practice. They are:
Natural feedback
Human feedback
Progress tracking
Natural Feedback
The most direct form of feedback is natural feedback, which is naturally given to you as you perform the activity. The most direct example of this is a musical instrument. The person playing the instrument, in most cases, knows what the musical passage should sound like. If they play a wrong note or rhythm, they’ll immediately be able to hear it. The instrument will provide natural feedback indicating that they used a wrong fingering or pressed the wrong keys/buttons. Most activities we practice provide us lots of natural feedback. Winning or losing a game, being able to solve a problem, or hitting a certain score are all examples of natural feedback.
Human Feedback
Human feedback is when you get the help of an expert, a coach, or a teacher. This person can review your performance and provide specific feedback to improve it. While teachers can require more resources to access, a knowledgable and experienced teacher can be a powerful catalyst for improvement.
Progress Tracking
By tracking our progress over time, feedback can provide us with a measurement of how we’re progressing. All learning goals should have a metric associated with them. Using the metric as a target, natural and human feedback can indicate your progress towards the goal, and help you determine if your practicing is effective. Tracking your progress can be as simple as documenting the date and today’s metric in a notebook.
If your practicing is effective and you’re following the principles of purposeful practice, you’ll be able to see yourself progress towards that goal. If your practice is inefficient and you’re not applying the principles of purposeful practice, you’ll likely hit a plateau in your growth, or not make any progress at all.
Let Me Help You Design a Practice Strategy
For one-on-one help with organizing and creating your own practicing strategy, send me an email at gabe@learnchangedo.org.