How to Improve Your Focus When Practising Guitar

The modern world is full of distractions - some people have gone as far as using the term the “attention economy” to refer to how apps try to keep us scrolling.

It’s something I try to stay conscious of, and at times it feels like a battle.

Our phones are an obivous culprit, with social media apps making it incredibly easy to keep scrolling.

Something that we talk about in How to Practice Guitar was the importance not just of practice, but of being focussed while we practice…

Which brings me around to what I’ve been doing over the last two weeks to try and improve my focus:

1) Locking Down the Phone

No social media apps.

No games.

I deleted them all.

I set the screen to greyscale (seeing the phone in colour actually makes me feel ill now, the colours are so intense and saturated, it’s part of what sucks us in).

I got an app called Dumb Phone which removes the home screen icons and turns the icons into a text list.

My phone has all the functionality of maps, whatsapp, the camera etc; it’s just incredibly boring to use.

Which is perfect.

2) Removing the Internet From my Music Computer

I use Logic Pro a LOT when practising - it’s a complex program but it’s fantastic once you get the hang of it. Anyway, I’d often get distracted with my work emails, Facebook etc during practice time.

So I dug out an old 2015 macbook pro I had lying around, installed Linux Mint and now that is my “internet access” computer. I’ve still got a few workflow tweaks to sort out with this setup, but I’ve stopped using email entirely on my music computer, which is a step in the right direction.

I’m working on getting my music computer to the point where it has no itnernet access and it is a completely distraction free environment.

Having two computers does make this easier, if you only have one there’s an app called Freedom that you can use to lockdown your computer for Deep Work time.

What Can You Do?

So what can you do? Are there two or three steps you can take to improve the quality and focus of your practice time and practice environment?