Learning piano can be difficult because, as a busy adult, finding the time each week to practice piano enough to make progress and effectively using the time you do find is hard. I'm a busy adult, and trust me, I get it. My days are filled with decisions on how to effectively spend the already too-little time I have. From meal-planning, to driving around, to hitting all the appointments in my calendar, it can be difficult to find enough time even to sit down each day to practice the piano, let alone spend time on a hobby, or scarier yet, learn a completely foreign new skill.

But no matter what happens day to day, I still keep my musical goals in mind. I know that in order to continue getting better at playing the piano, it needs to be a top priority. That’s why I’ve created this blog post: to help you get the most out of your piano lessons and maximize whatever time you are able to dedicate.

It can feel overwhelming to see how good some people are at things like painting, dancing, or playing an instrument, and wondering – “How do they even have the time for this? I can never get to that level; I barely have time for myself!” Don’t fear though – studies on productivity and how to get the most out of your day can help you organize your days to finish everything you need to get done and have enough time to finally tackle that new hobby you’ve been trying to start.

If you're trying to learn to play the piano, these productivity tips and a good piano practice routine will have you playing songs faster than you can believe.

What is the most effective way to learn piano?

Having trouble managing your time? Are you feeling like your brain is fried, and you try to relax by spending time on social media or TV, but then you spend too much time on those and end up not having enough time for the thing you’ve been trying to finish, so then you get locked in the endless stressful spiral of procrastination and deadlines? Here are some methods to help you manage your time better.

Using THE POMODORO TECHNIQUE to Learn Piano:

The Pomodoro Technique was developed by Frances Cirillo in the 80s. It is a simple and repetitive routine of 25 minutes working and 5 minutes relaxing, repeated 3-4 times, after which you take a longer break of 15-30 minutes. It is called the pomodoro method because he used a tomato shaped timer (tomato is pomodoro in Italian) to measure his productive and relaxing time.

If you are someone that struggles with procrastination and reacts well to a reward-based system (you get 5 minutes to relax doing an activity of your choosing such as scrolling social media, having a snack, or whatever your heart desires as your “reward”), this system can really help you to get more out of your time. As an avid gamer, I personally have used this system because having rewards and achieving specific goals resonates well with my love of getting to the next level or finding treasure (reward) at the end of a long series of trials (productive time).

You can use the Pomodoro Technique to get more out of your piano practice time. The recommended amount of daily piano practice is only 30 minutes a day to make progress — making this technique a natural fit. If you use the Pomodoro Technique and spend one of your 25-minute productivity blocks playing the piano, you're on your way to establishing a great piano practice routine.

Practicing Piano with the “EAT THE FROG” METHOD:

Coined by Brian Tracy after a particularly vivid quote from Mark Twain, the “Eat the Frog” Method, at its core, means to do the most difficult task of your day first. The quote states: if your job is to eat a frog, you should do it first thing in the morning so you don’t dread doing it all day.

This method works because of how simple it is. If you’re like me, you practice the delicate art of productive procrastination – that is, procrastinating from doing a job that is very big and/or complex by being “productive” and doing a lot of other, much smaller, and much more achievable things. Not “eating the frog” before doing all the other tasks of the day results in gradually imagining the task as more and more daunting – and at the end of it all, the task feels herculean, almost a Mount Everest of a task – all because by delaying, all you’ve done is place that task on a pedestal. If you had tackled that task first, when you had the most energy and time, it would have been much more achievable, and greatly reduced the stress you were feeling throughout the day.

The "Eat the Frog” method can easily be applied to creating a better practice routine for piano. If you come home from a long, tiring, busy day at work, and you still have to cook, or clean, or answer emails, by the time you have done all those little things, you’ve completely run out of energy to focus on practicing the piano. So, if you can, complete your piano practice routine with your morning coffee, or before you sit down for dinner after coming home from work. The sooner you’ve completed your daily piano practice, and the sooner you can get it off your mental to-do list, the lighter you will feel and the better your practice will be.

Establishing a routine through this method will absolutely skyrocket your piano-playing skills. It is difficult to overstate the benefit of daily practice for an instrument. Playing an instrument involves parts of the brain and certain fine motor skills not used for really anything else, so practicing those motions every day builds skill so quickly you’ll be surprised at how fast you can play the songs and pieces you were just dreaming about before.

Learning Piano with the “SMART GOALS” METHOD:

The “SMART” in “SMART Goals” stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. This method is incredibly helpful for organizing your tasks in a step-by-step achievable fashion which will lead to results instead of disappointment.

Let’s say your goal is to get better at the piano. How will you achieve that goal? What will you do to get better? How do you know that what you are doing (or planning to do) is working? This can be especially hard for beginner piano learners, as without previous knowledge of how to study an instrument, getting better is often slow and frustrating. Using the SMART Goals method to reframe the goal of getting better at the piano can lead to real, achievable, and tangible results.

Specific:

First, we have to be specific. What does getting better at the piano mean? It can mean different things for different people. It may mean that you want to be able to play and sing at the same time. It may mean the ability to read sheet music, and the world of classical and jazz piano is now open to you. It may mean that you want to learn chords, so when looking at a lead sheet for a song you like, you can play it. Pick a specific, concrete musical goal, and create steps leading up to it.

The more abstract the goal, the harder it is to actually achieve on a day-to-day basis, as planning your piano practice every day to achieve an abstract goal is difficult to define. Thus, specificity when creating goals to achieve through your piano practice is essential.

Measurable:

Second, we have to be measurable. How do you know that what you are doing is actually working, and you are improving your piano playing skills? Here is where you get even more specific – pick a specific song, or piece, or technique you want to learn, and figure out how to measure that you are completing your goal. For example, for a classical piece, you can measure it by the number of measures you perfect while practicing every day. For a song, it can be perfecting a verse, or a chorus, as a measure of your progress.

Achievable:

Third, your goals must be achievable. Too often we set too-high expectations for ourselves, and too-short time constraints for achieving those goals, and then fall short. Then we feel like we are inherently failures, and are discouraged from continuing to try to learn new things and progress towards our goals. I’ve personally felt this many times in my life, but reminding myself that it is not me who is a failure, just the strategy I have picked, has helped me immeasurably. This strategy can help you avoid those pitfalls by ensuring that the goals you set are actually achievable.

When you practice piano, for example, instead of setting a goal like “I will learn this whole very difficult song today,” you set a goal of “I will start with this easier song until my skills improve, and just learn the verse of this song today.” The goal is specific, and achievable, making it much more likely to be completed.

Relevant:

Fourth, your goals must be relevant. Why are you learning this specific song? Is this particular goal building towards your overall abstract goal of getting better at the piano, or are you just setting goals for progress’s sake and not going in the direction you hope for?

Piano, and music in general, consists of very many genres, and sometimes you can get lost trying to do so many different genres that you never feel comfortable in any of them. It is important that you consistently remember your original end goal, and even adjust it as you learn more music, improve, and ensure that at least most of your day-to-day goals are in line with your endgame.

Time-Bound:

Fifth, your goals must be time-bound. If you set goals, but no time constraint to reach them, then you are not measuring properly, nor being specific enough in your goals for this system to help you be more productive. It is essential that a time limit is defined for most of the previous steps to work. How can you measure your progress without having a time element in your measuring? Are you being specific enough in your goals if it takes you weeks to achieve them (this is possible, of course, but I find it is more effective if the time constraints are much shorter, such as days, or a week at most)?

You can practice the piano better if you set both daily and weekly goals, then achieve them. You can be forgiving, of course, as we are all busy adults and can’t always achieve everything every day. However, even making an effort to set and achieve goals is invaluable.

There are of course many different strategies to improve productivity when learning to play an instrument, but these are some that have worked for me, especially in the context of improving my musical skills and being able to play the songs, jazz standards, and classical pieces that I want to be able to play. You can use one of these strategies, or all of them in conjunction with each other – whatever works best for you. The key to establishing routine is just sticking to something until it becomes routine. It is easier than you think for a habit to form – you just have to go and do it.

How to Practice Piano:

Ok, ok, you’ve finally found the time to practice piano, and are ready to start getting into it. But what’s the best way to practice piano at home? What do you actually do when you sit at the keys?

The way I usually think about it is figuring out exactly how much time I have and catering my practice to the time I have available. The recommended time to practice piano daily is 30 minutes, but as a fellow busy adult I also am not always able to find thirty consecutive minutes daily to practice. So, I’ve designed a piano-practice routine that works if you have five, ten, or the full 30 minutes that day.

If possible, you should practice the piano every day. If you include piano as part of your routine, studies show that daily music can help reduce stress levels, lower blood pressure, increase immunological response, as well as keep our brain sharp through the years to help prevent diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. It also is a great way to relax, and ensure that your brain is being used for as many different purposes as possible.

How to Practice Piano in 5 MINUTES:

So you’ve been crazy busy today, and you barely even have five minutes to touch the keys, but you don’t want to lose the progress you’ve been making. If you only have a few minutes to practice piano, you should focus on maintaining the muscles that you’ve been building.

You should play scales, or arpeggios, or another form of exercises assigned to you by your piano teacher, depending on your level. This is especially important at the beginning of your piano study, as at this moment, your fingers are more like obstacles to playing well, rather than perfectly sharpened tools to do exactly what your mind wants them to. It is much less damaging to your progress at an intermediate level to skip days here and there than it is at a beginner level, so I highly recommend making your best effort to touch the keys every single day. This serves a dual purpose: training your fingers so that they become useful rather than dragging you down, as well as creating a habit that will make it feel like you missed something when you don’t practice, leading to a better piano practice routine that will serve you well into the intermediate level and beyond.

How to Practice Piano in 10 MINUTES:

Alright, you have ten minutes to practice. Still not ideal, but we can work with it. If you only have 10 minutes to practice piano, I recommend spending five minutes on warmups and exercises. It is basically the five minute practice, with some additions. After you’ve warmed up a bit and completed your exercises, I recommend just playing through the piece or song that your instructor has assigned you. It is difficult to get a thorough practice with just ten minutes, but it is important to remember why you started learning music in the first place, so just playing through the piece or song will help achieve that goal.

How to Practice Piano in 30 MINUTES:

A half hour is the ideal, recommended amount of time to practice. Concert pianists will practice for two to three hours a day, but as a hobby musician 30 minutes is plenty of time to improve your piano skills and have a better piano practice. I still recommend that you do your exercises, however, I would extend it to doing exercises for seven to eight minutes, or even ten if you want to do an exercise heavy day, which I recommend from time to time. You should use this time to learn a new exercise every few days: a new scale, or a new exercise from Hanon, etc. This will ensure that you don’t get amazing at one scale and then flop when you try to learn a new one. You must stay agile and apply your skills to many different exercises or you won’t be getting as much benefit out of them.

Then you start learning the piece or song on the piano that your instructor has assigned you. However, you don’t just play through the piece lots of times and hope that somehow you’ll improve over time. You will improve over time, but that time is vast and there are much more effective approaches to learning.

The strategy is to divide it into small, achievable blocks - usually one or two measures. It depends on the piece, and your instructor can help you figure out how to divide each specific piece into these blocks. It may even vary throughout the piece, so having an instructor there at the beginning to help you figure out how to do those divisions on your own is invaluable. Then you practice these blocks one at a time, starting with the right hand, then, when that feels comfortable, moving on to the left hand, then, when that feels comfortable, repeating the right hand a couple of times to remember, and then combining hands.

You should be playing much slower than the piece is actually asking for. I cannot overstate this. It has to be slower, because if you try to play it immediately at full speed, you will more than likely fail, leading to you repeating the blocks so often that you end up ingraining your mistakes rather than improving them. Do it so slowly that a turtle would get bored, but do it right, and then increase speed as you get more comfortable. Take short breaks by taking your hands off the piano for ten-fifteen seconds and shaking them. When the first block is comfortable, learn the second block using the same strategy, then combine the two blocks. Then learn the third block, then the fourth, and combine the third and fourth. Then combine blocks one to four. Do this over and over again, taking as many days as you need to do it right, until you finish the piece.

If you find that you keep making the same mistake in the same part of the song, there are two ways to address this. One is to make the block smaller, and just practice the few notes, as small as the transition between two notes, and practice that over and over until it is comfortable and it becomes muscle memory rather than thought. The other, which I recommend about as often as the first strategy, is to just move on. Instead of ingraining the same mistake over and over again until it becomes a habit to break, which is much harder to overcome, it is a more effective use of your time to move on and return to that spot later in your piano practice, or even the next day.

It is so important when you practice that you do not go too fast and try to learn too much while not perfecting what you learned previously. All you will do is ingrain your mistakes instead of improving. Take your time, even if it is frustrating. You will improve, but only if you are patient.

Tips For Getting the Most Out of Piano Lessons:

The key to establishing an effective piano practice routine, especially for beginners, is first finding the time to practice as close to daily as possible, and then making the most use of the time that you do find to make your piano practice most effective.

It is part of your piano teacher’s job to not only teach you skills and exercises, but to also teach you how to practice piano at home and make use of your time. Though every person is different, and your teacher can help customize your practice to suit your individual needs, goals, and abilities, this guide will help you improve your piano skills, as well as find a way to be a happier, more productive person in general.

I know I am most happy when I am actually achieving the goals I set out for myself, instead of feeling like a failure when I am not using my time most efficiently. Learning an instrument is difficult, but incalculably rewarding. Making time for it can be challenging, but there are few things that make me feel better daily than putting my hands on my instrument and just letting the music carry me away. There’s just nothing like the feeling of creating my own sound, or reproducing beautiful works of classical music with my own emotions running through it. I’ve never regretted learning the piano, and I doubt you will either.

Schedule Piano Lessons Near Watertown, MA

When you sign up for private piano classes with Boston Piano Lessons, your instructor will create a custom learning and practice plan that’s geared toward your lifestyle and the way you learn best. Our music school near Watertown offers piano lessons for aspiring and hobby musicians of all levels, so whether you’re coming to us as a complete novice or are looking to advance your musical knowledge, we’ll be happy to have you!

FAQ About Learning to Play the Piano

What are the most effective ways to learn piano?

Using a time management technique such as the Pomodoro Technique, "Eat the Frog" method or the SMART Goals Method.

How long should I learn piano a day?

We recommend practicing the piano for 30 minutes a day.

How do I establish a routine when practicing piano?

The key to establishing routine is practicing over and over, and sticking to something until it does in fact become routine.

How long does it take to get good at piano with lessons?

This will depend on each student's dedication to learning. Students who adopt a good practice schedule may learn quicker than others.

How Can I Practice Piano Fast?

If you only have five minutes to practice, you should play scales or arpeggios, or another form of exercises assigned to you by your teacher, depending on your level.

How to Get the Most Out of Piano Lessons: A Guide to Practice & Productivity