Tracking your progress
When I studied at the Jamaica School of Music in the late 80's I was confronted by a challenge...I did not know how to learn music and was enrolled in a program that required me to not just play the guitar when I felt like but to achieve certain goals in a specific time frame and do performances and a host of other obligations.
I was fortunate to have as a teacher Ray Hitchins who in the first lesson had me create a "Practice Journal". It was essentially an exercise book that was ruled into columns. The columns were headed as follows:
Date, Time, Activity, Speed, Goal, Remarks.
The system was simple. Whenever I practised I would log it in my journal. I would write in the date and then the time for each activity. I would not do more than 7.5 minutes for any activity as I found that my mind would wander after that time. With this in mind I would average 5-7 minutes for any activity (such as a scale, warm up exercise etc). For the technical exercises I would make a note of the metronome setting in beats per minute (BPM) which is a number like 90 or 140. I would then have my goal stated such as "Even 16th notes at 144 BPM". When I was finished the exercise I would record how I did or anything that I observed such as muscular tension or issues of interpertation or musicalilty that were a challenge under the "Remarks" column.
Over the practice time I would move from the technical to the musical starting with warm ups, going through a series of technical exercises such as scales, arpeggios and other variations. I would then move on to an hour of sight reading (which I hated) and then left the best for last which was working on performance pieces from classical guitar compositions to rock guitar solos.
All of this made up my structured practice time which was separated from my fooling around time on the guitar where I just doodled and messed around with concepts.
This system taught me how to think about my practice time. Ray taught me through this to be intentional in what I was doing as a musician. The ruled exercise book was the way I tracked my progress or lack thereof. It helped me to know exactly what I was doing everyday and was the primarily tool for my development as a guitarist and musician.
I encourage you to find ways to track your progress and feel free to discuss this and other methods with your music mentors.
Avant!
Seretse