How Learning Music Can Boost Your Productivity: 10 Practice Habits and the Research Behind Them

Circle the hardest bar of the piece you are learning. Play only that bar, slowly, until it comes out clean three times in a row, then add the bar after it. That small routine, from our free How to Practice sheet, holds most of this article: a clear goal, a small chunk, an honest speed, instant feedback and a rule for when to move on.

Learning an instrument drills those habits every day, and many of them help at work, too. Below are ten of them, each tied to a technique you can try at the piano (or any instrument) today, with the research behind it: who studied it, how, and what they found. We'll be honest about the limits, too. There is no good evidence that music lessons make you more productive at your desk, and the famous "Mozart effect" did not survive a closer look. What the evidence does support is narrower and more useful: some ways of practicing work better than others, and you can use the same methods on any skill or project.

What the research says, and what it doesn't

The modern study of practice starts with a 1993 paper in Psychological Review by K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Krampe and Clemens Tesch-Römer. They studied violin students at the Music Academy of West Berlin in three groups: the best, the good, and students from the music-education department. During one diary week, the two stronger groups practiced alone about 24 hours, the education students about 9. By age 18, the best group had practiced an estimated 7,410 hours on average, the good group 5,301 and the education group 3,420. The authors called the key ingredient deliberate practice: activities "specially designed to improve the current level of performance." Malcolm Gladwell's 2008 book Outliers later turned the study into the "10,000-hour rule."

The critics have been busy since. A 2014 meta-analysis of 88 studies by Brooke Macnamara, David Hambrick and Frederick Oswald in Psychological Science found that the amount of deliberate practice explained 14% of the differences in performance overall and 23% in music (figures as corrected in 2018).

The share of the differences in performance that practice explained, by domain, in the 2014 meta-analysis by Macnamara, Hambrick and Oswald (values as corrected in 2018). Everything to the right of each bar is left unexplained by practice.

A music-only meta-analysis by Friedrich Platz and colleagues (2014) found a stronger link, a corrected correlation of 0.61 across 13 studies. And when Macnamara and Megha Maitra repeated the violin study in 2019 with 39 students and a double-blind design, the best violinists had not practiced more than the good ones (on average, a little less); practice explained 26% of the differences in skill, against 48% in the original analysis.

So practice matters a lot, especially in music, but it isn't the whole story, and how you practice matters as much as how long. Whether music lessons make you smarter in general is a separate, disputed question: meta-analyses of children's studies range from no effect (Sala and Gobet, 2020) to a small one (Román-Caballero and colleagues, 2022). Our article on how learning an instrument changes the brain covers that debate. This one is about habits.

1. Practice on purpose

Deliberate practice is not the same as playing. Ericsson's team described it as structured work with one aim, getting better: tasks chosen to fix a weakness, full attention, quick feedback and many repetitions of the same task. Their violinists rated practicing alone as the single most relevant activity for improving, and one of the most effortful, which is why it comes in limited doses.

A summary of deliberate practice as Ericsson, Krampe and Tesch-Römer described it in 1993.

At the instrument, start each session with a goal you could check, such as "bar 3 clean at 60," not "work on the minuet." Write it at the top of the page before you play a note. Time alone is a poor measure: when Peter Miksza observed 40 college brass players in a 23-minute practice session (Journal of Research in Music Education, 2006), the time they spent playing was not related to how much they improved.

At work: swap "work on the report" for a goal you can check in one sitting, such as "draft the three section headings," and judge the session by whether you hit it.

2. Break it into chunks

A hard passage is a big task; one bar is a small one. The How to Practice sheet's recipe: play only the hard bar until it is easy, then add the bar after it, then the bar before, and last the whole line.

The chunk-it plan from How to Practice (Handout 222), on the sheet's own four-bar tune with its fingering: bar 3 alone, then bars 3–4, then bars 2–4, then the whole line.

Chunking is also how musical memory works. Andrea Halpern and Gordon Bower (American Journal of Psychology, 1982) briefly showed musicians and non-musicians written melodies. Musicians remembered well-formed melodies better than poorly formed ones, and their advantage over non-musicians shrank as the melodies became random: they were grouping the notes into musical units. In Miksza's 2011 study of 55 college wind players (Psychology of Music), the players with higher performance scores more often repeated two-to-four-bar chunks, practiced whole-part-whole and chained sections together. That study is correlational: it shows what good practicers do, not that chunking alone made them better.

Patterns make bigger chunks. In bars 13–16 of the Minuet in G, one shape appears three times, a step lower each time, as our Motif and Sequence sheet explains.

Minuet in G, bars 13–16, right hand, from the verified score behind our Minuet in G study: the same five-note shape starts on C, then B, then A. Learn it once, then move your hand.

How to Practice adds one more trick: some days, start at the end. Most pieces get practiced from the top, so the last line gets the least work.

At work: cut the project into the next piece you can finish today, master it, then connect it to its neighbors.

3. Slow down, fix it, then speed up

When a mistake happens, the sheet's fix-it loop says: stop, find the exact notes, play them slowly, get three clean in a row, then put the spot back into the piece. A mistake on try two sends the count back to zero.

The fix-it loop from How to Practice. Three clean tries in a row means three correct repetitions, not three attempts.

The research behind this comes from a much-cited study of piano practice. Robert Duke, Amy Simmons and Carla Davis Cash (Journal of Research in Music Education, 2009) observed 17 advanced piano students practicing a hard three-bar passage from a Shostakovich concerto and tested them the next day. How long they practiced and how many times they played the passage did not predict who played best. What did: the share of their practice trials that were correct, and how few wrong ones they played. Every wrong repetition is practice too, of the wrong thing. If a spot keeps breaking in the same place, Fingering Principles says to suspect the fingering first.

Speed comes back in small steps. Set the metronome where the passage is perfect, then raise it 4 to 8 clicks at a time; after a slip, go back down. Our Tempo & the Metronome sheet puts it in one line: the metronome sets the speed of your accuracy, not your ambition. In Miksza's 2011 study, slowing down and using a metronome also went with higher scores.

The tempo ladder: start where bar 3 is perfect (here 60), climb 4 clicks at a time toward the goal (76), and step back down a rung after a slip.

At work: when something breaks, don't push on or restart from scratch. Find the exact step that failed, redo it slowly until it is reliable, then speed up.

4. Vary how you repeat

Twenty identical repetitions can turn into autopilot. Many teachers vary them instead: play the hard bar long–short, short–long or staccato, keeping the same notes and fingers. The Your Daily Technique Routine sheet gives the week's scale a new rhythm each day, including the long–short skip of The Dotted Eighth + Sixteenth.

Four ways to repeat one hard bar. Only the rhythm or the touch changes; the notes and fingers stay the same, so the hand learns one fingering.

Direct research on rhythm variants is thin. The closest evidence is on varied, or interleaved, practice. Christine Carter and Jessica Grahn (Frontiers in Psychology, 2016) had 10 advanced clarinetists practice two pieces in 12-minute blocks and two others in alternating 3-minute turns. Wherever the ratings of the three professional judges differed between the two schedules, the interleaved pieces scored better, though results varied from judge to judge. It is a small study, in line with what motor-learning research calls the contextual interference effect.

Splitting the hands is another way to vary the work. How to Practice says: right hand alone, then left hand alone, getting notes, fingers and counting right, then hands together slowly again, even if each hand was fast on its own.

Minuet in G, bars 1–2: right hand alone, left hand alone, then together, with the suggested fingering from our Minuet in G study.

At work: rotate between two or three related tasks instead of grinding one for hours.

5. Keep sessions short, take real breaks

Ericsson's violin students practiced in sessions that averaged about 80 minutes, and the two stronger groups napped more than the education students. Shorter is fine for the rest of us, and rest helps memory. In Amy Simmons's study (Journal of Research in Music Education, 2012), 29 musicians learned a nine-note keyboard sequence in three sessions spaced 5 minutes, 6 hours or 24 hours apart; accuracy improved in the second session only after a 24-hour gap, which points to sleep. In two lab experiments by Duke and colleagues (2009), people who took a 5-minute break early in a short keyboard practice made the largest gains overnight.

At work, the evidence for breaks is about energy more than output. A 2022 meta-analysis of micro-breaks of 10 minutes or less (Albulescu and colleagues, PLOS ONE) found they raised vigor and reduced fatigue, but did not reliably raise overall performance; that boost appeared only for less demanding tasks, and longer breaks helped more.

A 25-minute session built on the five steps of How to Practice, with a short break and one line in the log at the end.

Warm up with the C 5-Finger Scale in the right hand and its left-hand partner, slowly, with a round hand and loose shoulders.

The warm-up: the C 5-finger scale, each hand alone, up four steps and back home (Handouts 02 and 03).

At work: work in short blocks with real breaks, and sleep on anything hard you learned that day.

6. Set a goal and keep a log

Goals and records both have solid support in behavior research. A 2017 meta-analysis of 141 papers (Epton, Currie and Armitage, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology) found a small positive effect of setting goals, larger when goals were difficult, public or shared by a group. A 2016 meta-analysis of 138 experiments with almost 20,000 people (Harkin and colleagues, Psychological Bulletin) found that monitoring progress helped people reach their goals, more so when they wrote the progress down or reported it.

The How to Practice sheet ends with exactly that kind of log: minutes, warm-up, the hard spot you fixed, the metronome number you started and ended at, a play-through box and a weekly goal. A good weekly goal names the bars and the number, such as "bars 1–4 clean at 76."

An example week in the columns of the How to Practice log. Each day starts a little below the best so far and climbs 4 clicks at a time, as Your Daily Technique Routine suggests.

At work: end each day with one line: what you fixed, where you started, where you ended.

7. Record yourself, then compare

Feedback works, but not automatically. In a meta-analysis of 607 effect sizes (Kluger and DeNisi, Psychological Bulletin, 1996), feedback improved performance on average, yet over a third of the feedback interventions made performance worse; feedback did better when it kept attention on the task rather than on the self. Music research makes a similar point. In Michael Hewitt's study of 82 junior high school wind and percussion players (Journal of Research in Music Education, 2001), listening to their own recordings made no measurable difference, while those who listened to a model performance as they evaluated themselves improved more in tone, rhythm, melody and overall performance.

So put your phone on a stand, record one take, and listen once with a single question, such as "is the rhythm even in bar 3?" Then compare with a model. The Listen panel of our Minuet in G study has the whole piece and short excerpts, including bars 1–4 and 13–16.

At work: review your draft against an example of good work, one question at a time.

8. Make it a routine

A habit is a behavior that runs on a cue. Phillippa Lally and colleagues (European Journal of Social Psychology, 2010) asked 96 volunteers to repeat a daily behavior in the same context, such as "after breakfast." Among the 39 whose data fit the model well, reaching 95% of their peak automaticity took a median of 66 days, ranging from 18 to 254 (the longest times projected beyond the 12-week study), and missing a single day did not materially set them back.

An example month: 26 of 28 days, one key a week in the order of Your Daily Technique Routine, and two missed days that did not undo the habit.

Your Daily Technique Routine makes this concrete: five stations in about 15 minutes (warm-up, scale and arpeggio, one technical focus, a spot in your piece, a cool-down), one key a week, and a log. Same cue, same room, same order: with time, you stop deciding whether to practice and simply start.

A practice room at the University of Sydney: one piano, one music stand, few distractions. Photo: Jason Tong, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

At work: attach the habit to a cue you already have, such as your first coffee, keep it small, and don't treat one missed day as failure.

9. Rehearse the pressure

The last step of How to Practice is a play-through "like a little concert": no stopping, then notice the spots that wobbled. That is a small performance you can rehearse at home. In experiments by Oudejans and Pijpers (Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2009), 17 expert basketball players practiced free throws for five weeks with or without induced anxiety, and 17 expert darts players practiced high or low on a climbing wall. In both, only the group that had trained under anxiety kept its accuracy in the pressured test. And a simulated audition built by Aaron Williamon's team at the Royal College of Music (Frontiers in Psychology, 2014) produced anxiety and heart-rate patterns close to those of a real audition in the seven violinists measured.

On stage there is one take. Polina Osetinskaya at Koerner Hall, Toronto, 2023. Photo: Roman Boldyrev, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).

Once a week, play your piece once for your phone or for one listener, without stopping. For a smaller daily dose, Sight-Reading: Set 1 gives you four tiny pieces to read once, slowly and without stopping, even over mistakes.

At work: rehearse the presentation standing up, timed, in front of one colleague.

10. Create inside limits

Improvising feels risky because anything is possible. Our Improvising with the Pentatonic sheet removes most of the choices: five notes (C, D, E, G and A), one rhythm, and a two-bar question answered by a two-bar answer that lands on C. Its recipe has four steps: pick a rhythm, repeat it with new notes, leave some space, and end on the home note.

A question that stops on A and an answer that lands on C, made from five notes and one rhythm (Handout 339).

The research on limits and creativity is mixed: a 2019 review in the Journal of Management (Acar, Tarakci and van Knippenberg) describes the findings as fragmented and conflicting, with constraints helping in some studies and hurting in others. Treat a limit as a tool to get you started, not a law.

At work: give a brainstorm a constraint, such as three slides or one page, and a time limit.

Music while you work: what the research shows

Here the evidence is about listening, not learning, and it is mixed. A 2018 Bayesian meta-analysis of 65 studies (Vasilev, Kirkby and Angele, Perspectives on Psychological Science) found that background noise, speech and music all slightly lowered reading comprehension. Words did the most damage: music with lyrics was about as distracting as speech, while music without lyrics was not reliably distracting.

Background sound and reading comprehension in the 2018 meta-analysis by Vasilev, Kirkby and Angele. All three effects are small; most of the music effect comes from lyrics.

A 2022 systematic review of 154 experiments (Cheah and colleagues, Music & Science) found no effect in most cases, harm on memory and language tasks and on difficult tasks, and lyrics tending to be worse than instrumental music. Yet a 2023 meta-analysis of 47 studies on learning (de la Mora Velasco and colleagues, Psychology of Music) found a small benefit overall, largest when the music came before the test. And in Teresa Lesiuk's field study of 56 software developers (Psychology of Music, 2005), mood and work quality were lowest when the music was taken away, though time on task was longest.

One explanation for the good results is arousal and mood: music you enjoy can wake you up and lift your mood, and that can help with the task that follows. It also explains the "Mozart effect."

From a short-lived lab result to a myth: where a boost appeared, it came from arousal and mood, not from Mozart.

In practice, four rules of thumb follow from these studies.

What the listening research suggests, in four rules of thumb.

For tempo and playlists, see The Soundtrack of Wellness; for music and mood, The Healing Power of Music.

Put it together this week

1. Pick one piece and circle its hardest bar.
2. Write a goal for the week with bars and a number, such as "bars 1–4 clean at 76."
3. Run the 25-minute session four or five times, at the same time each day.
4. After each session, write one line in the log.
5. On the last day, record one take and compare it with a model.

The ten habits at a glance.

Next week, add Your Daily Technique Routine before the piece.

Free worksheets for this lesson

• How to Practice — the five-step session, the chunk-it plan, the fix-it loop and a weekly log
• Your Daily Technique Routine — five stations in about 15 minutes, one key a week, a new rhythm each day
• Tempo & the Metronome — the tempo words and how to climb 4 to 8 clicks at a time, with audio
• The C 5-Finger Scale — the right-hand warm-up, one finger per key
• The C 5-Finger Scale: left hand — the same five notes for the left hand
• Inside the Minuet in G — the piece behind two of our examples, with recordings to compare against
• Motif and Sequence — spot repeated shapes so a page of notes becomes a few chunks
• The Dotted Eighth + Sixteenth — the long–short rhythm used as a practice variant
• Fingering Principles — decide a fingering, write it in, and suspect it first when a spot keeps breaking
• Improvising with the Pentatonic — five safe notes, a question and an answer
• Sight-Reading: Set 1 — four tiny pieces to play once, without stopping

Practice the way you want to work

None of these habits needs special talent or hours a day: a clear goal, a small chunk, a slow, honest speed, a short break and one line in a log. If you want someone to check your goals, hear your takes and choose the next hard bar with you, a Tissimo teacher can do that in a live lesson.

Sources

• The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance (Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer, 1993) — Psychological Review
• Deliberate practice and performance in music, games, sports, education, and professions: a meta-analysis (Macnamara, Hambrick & Oswald, 2014; corrected 2018) — Psychological Science · 2018 corrigendum with the corrected values used here
• Is the deliberate practice view defensible? (Hambrick, Macnamara & Oswald, 2020) — Frontiers in Psychology
• The role of deliberate practice in expert performance: revisiting Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer (Macnamara & Maitra, 2019) — Royal Society Open Science
• It's not how much; it's how: characteristics of practice behavior and retention of performance skills (Duke, Simmons & Cash, 2009) — ERIC
• Relationships among achievement goal motivation, impulsivity, and the music practice of collegiate brass and woodwind players (Miksza, 2011) — ERIC
• Optimizing music learning: blocked and interleaved practice schedules (Carter & Grahn, 2016) — Frontiers in Psychology
• Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? (Harkin et al., 2016) — Psychological Bulletin
• How are habits formed: modelling habit formation in the real world (Lally et al., 2010) — European Journal of Social Psychology
• Auditory distraction during reading: a Bayesian meta-analysis (Vasilev, Kirkby & Angele, 2018) — Perspectives on Psychological Science
• Arousal, mood, and the Mozart effect (Thompson, Schellenberg & Husain, 2001) — Psychological Science
• Mozart effect–Shmozart effect: a meta-analysis (Pietschnig, Voracek & Formann, 2010) — Intelligence