Focus?

[inkspot]

Hello,

I'm new here so my apologies if this question would have been better posted in a different board.

I was wondering if there is anything that can be done to consistently optimize and retain a high level of focus while practicing-- similar to the "flow" mental state.
Depending on the day, my practice will either be focused and efficient, or, precisely the opposite. Even though I am fully aware of which state of practice I am in, I am at loss for methods to instigate or recover good focus once it is gone. These periods of mental disorganization may sometimes last for days on end, wasting time that is not available to me as a performance major. This is especially true as I am hoping to increase my learning speed (accuracy, musicality, etc.). This increase would be entirely possible if I could find a way to consistently focus as, when I do focus, my learning speed in greatly improved; as you can imagine, this unreliability becoming incredibly frustrating.
In short then, this seems to be a question regarding constancy and retention of focus more than anything.

My Thanks,
Inkspot

[yadeehoo]

Tough question. I depends a lot of your personality and how you like to do things. Sometimes you can wake up in the middle of the night and have a 3 hours session while you couldn't focusing during the day while you were supposed to? What's in you mind? Are you 100% for your piano or is there something else where you attention is going.

Getting into the learning state when you play piano is sometimes similar to the "inspiration" when a songwriter for ex. Good times, bad times.

Whatever happens, be sure to work on meaningful pieces, it will boost your focus for sure. Maybe challenge yourself a little more, so you know what you're in for.

Only personal opinion

[dogperson]

Sometimes I am literally able to 'will myself' to focus by concentrating on those sections that demand focus.   frequent, shorter, sessions seem  to be better for keeping focus  rather than one longer one.

  but when I have a practice session that is unfocused after about 10 minutes, I just stop, because I am wasting my time and return later.  Yes, I agree that  learning pieces that  motivates you helps,  but sometimes that is not enough for me.   Short and frequent .. and stop if life is creeping in.

[inkspot]

Thanks of the replies!

I am currently very lucky to be learning a repertoire I find very meaningful, that is why I am frustrated when I cannot focus-- I feel like I am not doing justice to the music I am learning.

dogperson:
I know the feeling of willing myself to focus. I do this as well but I often wonder is there is not a better solution than this and, if there is, how to get there. When you say that you practice short and frequently, how do you retrieve your focus from one session to the next? Is it a battle of wills again, or do the breaks make focusing easier for you?

yadeehoo:
When you say "100% for your piano", do you mean this in terms of external distractions or in terms of dedication? In the case of the later, I would reply yes: I am 100% for the piano. In the case of the former, I would reply no-- like and school prohibit me from having a completely clear head at any point in time, much less when I practice.
This leads to an interesting question-- How is "life" and "life in music" balanced? Can any brainstorming be done on ways that the mind can be cleared of the daily grind and be set solely on the task of practicing? Perhaps something similar to a mediative state? This last option would appear to work in theory, but I am unsure about its reliability in practice.

Thoughts?

[dcstudio]

number one...stop calling it practice because that word triggers something negative.  I have played for decades--and I spend hours and hours at the piano every day... it's not a grind at all.  It's my job...  I love to be at the piano I love to play..  it was a drag when I was young but not anymore. 

you have to figure out something that is "fun" for you to do at the piano...improvise, figure out songs from the radio...something...  it has to be fun enough that you can't wait to get home to your piano... fun enough that you want to play every day.   Once you do your fun thing you will be in a much better frame of mind to practice.

"flow" can't really happen during practice unless you are practicing something you know very well..or you are improvising.

you can't really get "in the zone" unless you love it...really love it.

[inkspot]

dcstudio:
My apologies if I am making the word practice sound negative-- its quite the opposite for me. Its funny you mention waiting all day to come home to the piano, this is precisely how I feel. I'm happy to know I'm not the only one 
This said, the focus is most definitely not an issue of lacking love of enjoyment for the instrument...

What are the chances of this this focus dilemma (if we call it one) is due to general mental fatigue? I am taking an extremely heavy course load at the moment... What can be done at that point? Is it a problem of balancing music with the other obligations of life? Just brainstorming again...

[dogperson]

The breaks make it much quicker to focus quickly.  Before I sit down, I mentally plan 'measures xx-xx get 30' of practice, so I mentally plan that it will be a brief session that needs my concentration.  The other thing that seems to help is split up practice between multiple scores.. when I lose focus on the sonata, I drag out the tango or the nocturne.  Really, this keeps the frustration lower.

Short sprints of time is what mentally works best for me-- I seem to better internalize "Get with it.. you don't have long to try".  

My piano teacher has suggested that if you have interrupting thoughts of what you need to do, keep a pencil and paper handy, jot it down, and go back to practice.  Now that I shorter sessions with a plan, I don't need this.  

What you can't allow yourself to do is spend time sitting at the piano forever with no accomplishment... which is what happens when you lose focus.  You might as well have been taking a nap.  

P.S.  I don't count just playing what I already know in this discussion.. DC is right-- learn what you love, but that is not my problem.  I choose my own repertoire for lessons, so it is only what I love.  The difference is loving what you can play and loving learning what you can't (yet) without a lot of elbow grease.  I could literally play for eight hours if it were repertoire I already have bu4t if is new and takes that concentration, short intervals is what I now do.

[dcstudio]

spend time sitting at the piano forever with no accomplishment... which is what happens when you lose focus.  You might as well have been taking a nap.  

understand that I am commenting on this from the viewpoint of a professional pianist not as  a student.

those times that I goofed off at the piano and those times I was angry and just pounded the crap out of it... those times I got fed up with playing my lesson material and instead figured out Bennie and the Jets and Linus and Lucy by ear (no internet then)...  those songs I would make up or improvise that were full of bombastic arpeggios because I was imitating Liberace... the games of "name that tune" I would play with my friends where I would pluck out a melody and they would guess what it was...  the stuff I thought was pointless, not really playing, actually feeling like a heretic for -- I learned more from that than any lesson I ever had. Those times were every bit as important to my development as any formal training I have had....and I had a bunch...

this is where I experienced free fingers that could do anything...  there are no mistakes when you  are goofing off so you play fearlessly.   It's usually kinda painful to hear at first... but you get better and better at it.

my point is... it's not a waste of time... ever   no matter how pointless it feels... your brain is still learning.   maybe your sonata didn't improve...but you learned something...

[yadeehoo]

You can notify people around you that you wanna not be disturbed for the next 2 hours.

You also ask someone to act as a kind of reminder to get back to your school stuff, dinner, whatever. So for 2 hours you're free and lost in time. 2 hours later someone will come and see you to unplug you.

I dunno, it's just an idea but external help helps. I tend to be head in the sky so for example I tie my house keys to my jeans on a leach, so I don't have to worry I leave them on the door outside.

[inkspot]

understand that I am commenting on this from the viewpoint of a professional pianist not as  a student.

those times that I goofed off at the piano and those times I was angry and just pounded the crap out of it... those times I got fed up with playing my lesson material and instead figured out Bennie and the Jets and Linus and Lucy by ear (no internet then)...  those songs I would make up or improvise that were full of bombastic arpeggios because I was imitating Liberace... the games of "name that tune" I would play with my friends where I would pluck out a melody and they would guess what it was...  the stuff I thought was pointless, not really playing, actually feeling like a heretic for -- I learned more from that than any lesson I ever had. Those times were every bit as important to my development as any formal training I have had....and I had a bunch...

this is where I experienced free fingers that could do anything...  there are no mistakes when you  are goofing off so you play fearlessly.   It's usually kinda painful to hear at first... but you get better and better at it.

my point is... it's not a waste of time... ever   no matter how pointless it feels... your brain is still learning.   maybe your sonata didn't improve...but you learned something...

I found this very encouraging-- perhaps there is also something more to be said regarding the difference between a student mindset and a professional mindset. Because I (and I am sure many others) are looking for a career as a professional pianist, perhaps our perception on what is (and is not) a productive use of time is slightly off.

While I can only speak for myself, I often find myself thinking that unless I finish "x" number of pages and make "x" number of musical decisions about a piece of repertoire, I must have been wasting time during the practice week. This contributes to a great deal of anxiety between what I think should be done versus what is actually accomplished. It seems that someone who is already a professional would have a more expansive view of the situation, not gauging progress week by week, but rather by total growth as a musician. But I could be wrong, I wouldn't know about the professional mindset 

Perhaps to better focus, there needs to be a more defined goal about what to focus on.

For the reasons I mentioned above, setting page/decision goals have always been very counterproductive for me-- if the goal was too small and I met it, I didn't think it was anything to celebrate. If the goal was too large and I misses, I felt I had done something wrong.

If the goal is to become a better musician, how to we calculate this without becoming too vague? How do we then apply this in such a way where it becomes a productive tool of practice rather than an anxiety ridden hinderance?

[dcstudio]

I found this very encouraging-- perhaps there is also something more to be said regarding the difference between a student mindset and a professional mindset. Because I (and I am sure many others) are looking for a career as a professional pianist, perhaps our perception on what is (and is not) a productive use of time is slightly off.

While I can only speak for myself, I often find myself thinking that unless I finish "x" number of pages and make "x" number of musical decisions about a piece of repertoire, I must have been wasting time during the practice week. This contributes to a great deal of anxiety between what I think should be done versus what is actually accomplished. It seems that someone who is already a professional would have a more expansive view of the situation, not gauging progress week by week, but rather by total growth as a musician. But I could be wrong, I wouldn't know about the professional mindset 

Perhaps to better focus, there needs to be a more defined goal about what to focus on.

For the reasons I mentioned above, setting page/decision goals have always been very counterproductive for me-- if the goal was too small and I met it, I didn't think it was anything to celebrate. If the goal was too large and I misses, I felt I had done something wrong.

If the goal is to become a better musician, how to we calculate this without becoming too vague? How do we then apply this in such a way where it becomes a productive tool of practice rather than an anxiety ridden hinderance?

one of the biggest problems the older beginner has is all the preconceived notions he has accumulated concerning what it means to be "a pianist."  They set these rules up for themselves and then feel horrible when it doesn't produce the desired result.  They have been listening to some piano piece their whole lives while dreaming, wishing, envisioning themselves at the piano playing it.  In their mind, their fingers are pounding the keys,playing so quickly and they are incredibly strong and play it perfectly... part of their brain actually believes this fantasy... that's what they expect it to feel like when they sit down and play...  the reality is not the same thing...

the part of me that plays-- that performs--is that same persona that played Linus and Lucy for my friends... not the neurotic classical pianist who took all those lessons --if that makes any sense to you.  I am not suggesting at all that my training was not VITAL to my musicianship--because it was...  but when I perform...  it is the show-off, the clown, the goof off mindset I have and not the serious--"if  I screw this up than Beethoven will rise from the grave to haunt me personally" type of mindset I had at my recitals as a student.


if you think this is impossible than it will be...  it's important to find a way to think of this as easy.   this heavy focus you speak of... it's not heavy focus for me... it's light and breezy and fun... and I can do it for hours.   

[leemond2008]

A lot of answers on here and I'm pushed for time so I've not read them all so appologies if this has already been answered.

I find that I practice a hell of a lot better in the morning, I get up early before work and spend 20/30 minutes practicing, I find that I'm a lot more focused at at that time of day, as if my brain hasn't been weighed down with the days events.

I read somewhere once that a lot of professional pianists 'practice' in the morning and 'play' in the evening, how true that is I don't know but it works for me anyway.

[dcstudio]

I read somewhere once that a lot of professional pianists 'practice' in the morning and 'play' in the evening, how true that is I don't know but it works for me anyway.

very true...  although morning is open to a looser definition since we play till 2am sometimes.  I get up do my morning routine get a cup of coffee and sit and play for a couple of hours each day.  It's when I do the serious practicing... I will sit down throughout the day and between students... but I am not really focused then like I am in the morning.  So yes in my experience that is a very true statement.

[keypeg]

Whether you should turn left or right depends on where you are on the road.  Otherwise either choice might land you in a ditch. 

I grew up self-teaching and free, on a number of instruments.  I explored to my heart's content.  My Fuer Elise, when I was a kid, turned into Wagner during the thick chords because I had no idea how it was supposed to sound, and I had a whale of a time.  First time I heard the real thing thing on the radio I was sort of surprised.  So I never had the "practice to prepare for a recital" kind of angst.  That means I might need to turn right, where another needs to turn left, both of us to be in the middle of the road.

To balance things out, I need focused practice, and real practice.  However, that practice does not involve the angst, and it is not tedious.  In fact, it can be fascinating.  The very first thing that I discovered about focused practice is that you need to know what to focus on.  It has to be specific enough.  If you just "decide to focus", that is too abstract, and you can't keep it up.  Playing these three notes with a smooth motion - that is a concrete goal.  Anything of that nature.  Switching goals frequently enough so your mind doesn't wander.

There is a second kind of practice for me, where I play things through, more like performing.  Here there is an element of hanging loose.  It goes together with the first kind of practice, because whatever I did during focused practice will be there to support me during the hanging loose practice.  It won't be there as much, but "enough", and that gives it a nice balance.

[dcstudio]

  Playing these three notes with a smooth motion - that is a concrete goal.  .

yes it is!!!...  and once you learn to play those 3 notes with a smooth motion...the next set of three notes is that much easier.   

that is also an excellent way to improve your technique... practicing 3 and 4 note "cells"

believe it or not,  My jazz prof swore by it.

[keypeg]

One word - chunks.  Right?

[bronnestam]

I have found that the best ways to keep up focus is 1. careful planning of what I am going to do this session and 2. stop time. I have even set a timer sometimes. When it sounds, it means I "must" leave the piano. This prevents me from wasting my time at the piano.

Careful planning does NOT mean "work with that etude" or "learn bar xx to yy" or anything that vague. It must be more measurable. For example, what does "learn" mean, exactly?

Even if you have worked down to a detail level like "work with bar 12 to 14 where I have staccato in one hand and legato in the other and it sounds just awful and unbalanced", I'd say it is not quite enough. Before you end your planning and start practicing, you should have come up with one or two possible SOLUTIONS to the problem as well. Write these solutions down.

... NOW you know exactly what to do at the piano, right? So go the piano, set your timer if needed, bring your notes with you and do what you have written there. Not anything else.
I believe that lack of focus often is about not knowing exactly what to do. Your creative brain therefore starts to improvise by coming up with plenty of ideas and thoughts ... not all of them about the piano, unfortunately. In fact, your mind is not doing anything "wrong", you don't have a bad moral or anything like that. So, when you have a very, very clear map to follow, the chance is small that you get distracted.

On the other hand, working with such full concentration is also very demanding, so don't expect to keep your attention up for a long period of time. Maybe you will get tired after just 15 minutes, that is ok! Take a break then. If you have worked effectively during these 15 minutes, you will still have done a very good practice.

[dcstudio]

I have found that the best ways to keep up focus is 1. careful planning of what I am going to do this session and 2. stop time. I have even set a timer sometimes. When it sounds, it means I "must" leave the piano. This prevents me from wasting my time at the piano.

Careful planning does NOT mean "work with that etude" or "learn bar xx to yy" or anything that vague. It must be more measurable. For example, what does "learn" mean, exactly?

Even if you have worked down to a detail level like "work with bar 12 to 14 where I have staccato in one hand and legato in the other and it sounds just awful and unbalanced", I'd say it is not quite enough. Before you end your planning and start practicing, you should have come up with one or two possible SOLUTIONS to the problem as well. Write these solutions down.

... NOW you know exactly what to do at the piano, right? So go the piano, set your timer if needed, bring your notes with you and do what you have written there. Not anything else.
I believe that lack of focus often is about not knowing exactly what to do. Your creative brain therefore starts to improvise by coming up with plenty of ideas and thoughts ... not all of them about the piano, unfortunately. In fact, your mind is not doing anything "wrong", you don't have a bad moral or anything like that. So, when you have a very, very clear map to follow, the chance is small that you get distracted.

On the other hand, working with such full concentration is also very demanding, so don't expect to keep your attention up for a long period of time. Maybe you will get tired after just 15 minutes, that is ok! Take a break then. If you have worked effectively during these 15 minutes, you will still have done a very good practice.

man that's great I wish I could plan like that.  It's just impossible for me to be that organized and disciplined...I am missing that brain cell...  

what happens when you get to be my age... is that you are never at a loss for something to play.  I can sit for hours playing furiously while not really "practicing" anything...  lol  

[inkspot]

I have found that the best ways to keep up focus is 1. careful planning of what I am going to do this session and 2. stop time. I have even set a timer sometimes. When it sounds, it means I "must" leave the piano. This prevents me from wasting my time at the piano.

Careful planning does NOT mean "work with that etude" or "learn bar xx to yy" or anything that vague. It must be more measurable. For example, what does "learn" mean, exactly?

Even if you have worked down to a detail level like "work with bar 12 to 14 where I have staccato in one hand and legato in the other and it sounds just awful and unbalanced", I'd say it is not quite enough. Before you end your planning and start practicing, you should have come up with one or two possible SOLUTIONS to the problem as well. Write these solutions down.

... NOW you know exactly what to do at the piano, right? So go the piano, set your timer if needed, bring your notes with you and do what you have written there. Not anything else.
I believe that lack of focus often is about not knowing exactly what to do. Your creative brain therefore starts to improvise by coming up with plenty of ideas and thoughts ... not all of them about the piano, unfortunately. In fact, your mind is not doing anything "wrong", you don't have a bad moral or anything like that. So, when you have a very, very clear map to follow, the chance is small that you get distracted.

On the other hand, working with such full concentration is also very demanding, so don't expect to keep your attention up for a long period of time. Maybe you will get tired after just 15 minutes, that is ok! Take a break then. If you have worked effectively during these 15 minutes, you will still have done a very good practice.

What you describe in the fourth paragraph is precisely what I have been experiencing I say I lack focus. Thank you for putting into words what I could not 

I too think a great deal of the issue can be traced back to poor planning and lack of direction-- I have tried in the past to plan a meticulous practice schedule and while it works short term, I tend to fail in the long term. One of the problems I remember is that I would eventually make unreasonable goals for myself-- they were often too ambitious and had a high rate for failure. This leads to the question-- what exactly do we mean when we say the word "reasonable?" Musically reasonable? Technically reasonable? Is our perception different from the reality?

Would you be able to give a specific example of what a good practice goal would look like? I know it is subjective and different levels of detail work for different individuals, but finding out how you (and others) on this forum approach the problem would probably be a good starting point, I believe.

[bronnestam]

What you describe in the fourth paragraph is precisely what I have been experiencing I say I lack focus. Thank you for putting into words what I could not 

I too think a great deal of the issue can be traced back to poor planning and lack of direction-- I have tried in the past to plan a meticulous practice schedule and while it works short term, I tend to fail in the long term. One of the problems I remember is that I would eventually make unreasonable goals for myself-- they were often too ambitious and had a high rate for failure. This leads to the question-- what exactly do we mean when we say the word "reasonable?" Musically reasonable? Technically reasonable? Is our perception different from the reality?

Would you be able to give a specific example of what a good practice goal would look like? I know it is subjective and different levels of detail work for different individuals, but finding out how you (and others) on this forum approach the problem would probably be a good starting point, I believe.

Depends on what you mean by "practice goal". I don't have goals like "being able to play those 10 bars without errors at the speed of 102 before this day is over". What if I have to interrupt before I have achieved that, will that be considered a failure, or? Should I get punished and disappointed with myself? No, I don't want these feelings. So I would like to say "plan" instead of "goal". I plan to work with certain things, not to achieve them today or tomorrow the latest.

A technical goal like "practice even, punctuated and staccato scales through the whole circle of fifths" are also less tempting to me. I mean, I used to do that. Usually I got tired of it all before having gone through less than half of that goal, and then I left the piano without having worked even one minute with the pieces I was to learn ... and all I achieved was establishing the idea that piano practicing is boring and that I lacked talent, because this took me nowhere. You might think that these scale exercises will make your fingers fly at the end so that you can play like Lisitsa or something. Well ...

What you need is context because without it you will lose your focus, just as we now have concluded, and without focus you might just as well go and do something else.

I think I can give you a direct example of more focused "goals", because some weeks ago I came home from the best piano lessons of my life. I am a rather crappy amateur, 49 years old, my aim with piano playing is simply to enjoy one of my big passions in life. I played in my teens, then did not play for decades, and then started again about five years ago.


But, I happen to know a concert pianist, who in my opinion is the best pianist I have ever heard. (I have heard many ...) Taste may vary, but this is what I think and I am no the only one, by the way. So I highly admire his technique and I got the chance to be in his master class because I dared, as a friend, to ask to join a session which recently was offered. (We had no audience during my individual lessons, thank God for that.) The other students were terrific diploma students, probably some big names of tomorrow ... I listened to their lessons as well. So it was a wonderful opportunity for me, a mediocre amateur, to get lessons on Beethoven from someone who is easily on the same level as Barenboim. And what I just wrote to you about pinpointing the problem AND the solution is what I learned from there, so I will not pretend this wisdom is my own ...  

I complained about my Pathétique I which I cannot master at all, but I'm trying to learn it. When the allegro part starts, I fumble around. The staccato chords in my right hand are a disaster when I try to speed up ... after a while I kind of lose control, my fingers start to "scratch" like a nervous chicken looking for grains. At least that is how it feels. And sometimes I cannot fully synchronize my hands. I fumble, I stumble, I fall. So, there is a lot to solve there.

I know that most people would just tell me something like "practice very slooowly and then gradually speed up. And try to relax while you do it, OK?" And then I would sit with this "goal" for a while and hopefully, one day in the future, play more secure and less jerky ... after ten million attempts in different tempi, right?

This might sound good enough, but actually that is not a very good practice goal because it does not really address the problems, as it does not totally IDENTIFY the problems. Note, the problemS. There are several of them here, and the first thing this teacher taught me was the importance of working with them one at a time. Not try to find the right keys and get the synchronization and the tempo and the staccato accents and the general musical expression right altogether, by just practicing the same bars 22 times in slow tempo and later on speed it up, while I try to fix just about everything on the go ...

So the first thing I have to do is to position my right hand correctly for every chord. Not to play the chords, just put my hand on the keys and check that the wrist and arm position is such that the fingers are in parallel with the keys, then move to the next position by letting the wrist take the lead - not an exaggerated movement, just let the wrist move a few millimetres ahead and let the arm follow, so that I don't try to shift between the chords just by stretching my fingers out without moving my arm - it is easy to fall into that trap when you are in a hurry ...  

So, position, position, position, without actually pressing any keys. (If you don't have access to the score of the Pathétique sonata this explanation will be rather confusing, sorry about that.) And in every move also check that I don't get tense, which I should not do if I get dead sure on every position.

That was the first exercise to do, that can be one goal to plan for a practice session, to do the positions correctly. Then the staccato thing - my teacher explained that these quick chords must be played as "wrist staccatos" where you kind of flap your hand up and down from your wrist. Then I got an exercise to learn this wrist staccato, because if you to it in an uncontrolled manner you will look like a spastic: a simple C Major scale up and down, with just ONE finger at a time and a careful observation of the wrist movement every time, and then really check that I stop the downward movement in the right moment, and then also check that my finger lands in a correct curved position ...

As a contrast to the wrist staccato I can also experiment with playing with a movement "from the knuckles" just to notice the difference.

Well, this was just a little example on details we discussed for a while during a lessons and now I work with these details for this piece. The idea of "starting slow and then speed up" was not even mentioned here. So, I got the real problem sorted out, and then I got exercises to solve them, one at a time. It was also easy for me to apply what I learned on other situations and similar problems. The staccato exercise I got made perfect sense when I got it in a context, so now I can work with this boring scale and know exactly WHY I do it - therefore I will not lose my focus.

BTW, a wrist staccato scale like that is exhausting, so you cannot work with this more than a few minutes. This detail level might seem terribly time-consuming and energy consuming, but the point is that you work for minutes, not hours, with the issues. And yes, on this level it is not difficult to stay focused.

Hope this was of any kind of inspiration and help.  

 

[keypeg]

What I do is in some ways similar to what Bronnestam is describing, but not totally.   I thought about this a bit before writing.  First, my practising is governed by who I am at this point, what I can do, where weaknesses and strengths are, so what I need.  Secondly, what I'm trying to do overall.  I am a formerly self-taught student with all kinds of weak areas in how I move at the piano which hamper me, so I have to replace these with something better.  That has formed my goals over the past few years. There are strengths and weaknesses in this background.  Much of what I do at the piano is for this goal.  The pieces or exercises selected will be for that.  But I also do like to play music, and at times I develop pieces for the sake of playing pieces.  Then I'm practising toward developing those pieces, and that's a bit different.

I had a period where I was all locked up for chords.  That is, if I played chords with both hands at the same time, something went funky.  So some of it went toward problem solving: why was this happening, what was I doing, and what might I do instead.  If I learned a new way of moving which was promising, I'd make sure that when I sat down at the piano, I moved that way.  Then if I was playing music with these kinds of chords, I'd make sure to move that way.  I did not set a timer, but if I had reached it for maybe 15 minutes, I'd switch to something else, because you can only hold on for a short period.  I would change goals of this sort.

What happened when something like this got sorted, the new habit came into my body, and then it was almost automatic and then maybe some Linus and Lucy music could happen too.

When working on those kinds of goals, small pieces might be chosen to practice it.  We (I work with a teacher) weren't interested in developing the piece.  If I reached whatever the goal was, it was on to the next thing.  Or maybe several pieces for practising whatever thing or sets of things.  One thing I found is that if I had practised a certain way of moving on a given piece (A baby version of Oh When the Saints is memorable, since it took 6 weeks to break through), then if I play that piece, the memory of the movement also comes back through the piece.

------------
If I'm trying to develop a piece for performing it, then it's a different process.  I might try to play it through and explore it to see what kind of things I see in it as music, and maybe listen to performances to hear what those composers hear.  Then it goes to building the piece - the usual of finding good fingering that works, working on the basic notes in chunks so the framework is sitting underneath.  Working on difficult sections first - finding what the problems are and how to solve them.  This goes in the direction of what Bronnestam is describing.  If there is a technical thing, I might go on a tangent with that thing. .... There is a kind of "plan" to this: stage 1, 2, 3 - what to be practising during a given session.  But it's not timed or anything like that.

[bronnestam]

I like what you describe, keypeg.

An often recurring theme on this forum is whether pure exercises like Hanon are good or not. My own opinion, similars to keypegs, should be quite obvious by now: these exercises could be good or they could be useless or even bad, depending on the context. First you need to see a reason, then you can use the exercises as tools in order to develop a REQUIRED skill or to SOLVE an existing problem.
If you do that, you will work with a goal in mind and stay focused. If you just do the exercises just for the sake of it, because you think that is good for you, you are at risk of losing focus, do the exercises wrong or just lose your whole interest in piano playing because deep inside you know that you are doing something pointless.

[inkspot]

Hope this was of any kind of inspiration and help.  
 

Incredibly so-- thank you!

[briansaddleback]

Yeah, focus. It's good stuff.