The guitar is in its case. You bought it because you wanted to play, and you still do. There’s a lesson saved on your phone. Tonight you have half an hour free.

You end up watching a video about practicing, then another, and by the time you put the phone down you’re ready for bed. The lesson is still saved, and the guitar is still in its case.

If this sounds familiar, you probably don’t need someone to explain why practice matters. You need to work out what keeps happening in the minutes when you could have practiced.

Give the intention a place in your day

“I’ll practice this week” leaves you to make the decision again later. When later arrives, you have to remember, choose a time, get set up, and resist whatever you were about to do instead.

Try attaching the first move to something that already happens: “After I clear my dinner plate, I’ll take the guitar out and play the chord I learned last time.” You’ve named a moment you can recognize and an action you can carry out.

Researchers call this an implementation intention, often written as an if–then plan. A 2006 review of 94 studies found that these plans helped people reach their goals on average. That supports giving an intention a specific cue; it doesn’t mean a good sentence guarantees you’ll follow through.

When you already know the step

Sometimes you already know the step: open the project and fix the broken screen. If you keep avoiding it, writing “open the project” on another list probably won’t tell you what’s getting in the way.

Think about what you’re doing instead and why you keep choosing it. Your phone might be within reach, or opening the project might mean facing a bug you don’t know how to fix. You might also be exhausted, and this evening simply isn’t a good time to work.

Depending on what’s happening, you could put the phone in another room, ask someone to sit with you while you investigate the bug, or choose a time when you have more energy. If you want to rest tonight, that’s an option too; give the project a different time.

Making the task smaller can help if its size is what’s stopping you. If the obstacle is something else, that’s what needs your attention.

If you started before, return to where you stopped

You don’t have to rebuild your whole routine to return to something. Find the last point you remember: the paragraph you couldn’t finish, the chord change that sounded wrong, the error that made you close the laptop.

You could spend a few minutes at that point: write a rough version of the next sentence, try the chord change slowly, or reproduce the error and note what you see. Then you’ll have something to work with when you decide what to do next.

Use the attempt to decide

Afterward, think about whether you’re glad you tried and want another attempt. You might notice that changing the setup helped, or find that you don’t want to keep doing this.

It’s okay to change your mind after trying something. You have a little more to go on than when you were only imagining how it might feel.

If you’d like to return, leave yourself somewhere to resume, whether it’s the chord change, an unfinished paragraph, or a question you want to explore. And if you don’t want to return, that’s useful information too. Liking the idea of an interest doesn’t mean you have to keep it.

That’s what we’re testing in Alivr’s first workflow: helping someone begin or return, then learning from what they report. Alivr is still in development, but you can try the workflow now without an account. If you’d like to keep testing it over the following week, you can sign up for email prompts.

Sources