The Sunday morning Routine that decides your practice week

It's 9:45 on a Sunday night. The lesson was three days ago, and the teacher's notes are still folded in the front of the Hanon book. You have thirty minutes tomorrow morning, and maybe the same Tuesday through Friday if work stays quiet.

The job nobody thinks to hand off

Most practice advice assumes you have a teacher standing next to you, or enough experience to self-programme. The rest of us get a scribbled list in a notebook and a vague hope. Planning a week—balancing technique, repertoire, sight-reading, and the weak spots that showed up on Thursday—is a real cognitive load. And it recurs. Every single week.

A Routine set to Sunday morning would hand you a finished practice schedule before you pour your first coffee. You'd open the Delivery, glance at Monday, and start. No deciding. No guilt.

Here's how it works. You'd create a Routine with a Direction like this:

I'm an adult piano student at around Grade 3 standard. Lessons are on Thursdays. I can practise 30 minutes a day, Monday to Friday. I'm currently working on: F minor and D major scales (two octaves, hands together eventually), Czerny Op. 599 No. 45, and the Chopin Prelude in E minor (Op. 28 No. 4). Each Sunday morning, give me a clear weekly practice plan. Break it into daily sessions with a focus for each, specific bars, metronome starting marks, and one thing to listen for. If I left feedback last week, weave it in.

You'd pick a plain markdown Template—no special fields, just a shape you define—and set it to run every Sunday at 7am.

What a Delivery actually contains

After the first run, you'd get back a structured week, not a set of suggestions. The Delivery would open with this week's goal: maybe "Lock in the F minor arpeggio and get the Chopin up to bar 16 hands together." Then it would lay out each day.

A real Delivery would look something like this:

Notice the specificity. Not "practise Chopin" but "Chopin, LH alone bars 1–8, drop the weight." That's the difference between a prompt and a plan.

How the feedback loop tightens it

After the week, you'd leave a short note on the Delivery: "Scales felt solid. Czerny still messy from bar 13. Didn't get to sight-reading on Thursday." The next Sunday, the Routine reads that feedback alongside its memory of the last five plans. It knows not to give you the same sight-reading advice two weeks running. It knows you need more time on bars 13–16 and will pull back the tempo on Tuesday. It also remembers that you prefer to start weeks with technique and end with repertoire, so it keeps that shape.

Every week, the plan gets slightly closer to the one your teacher would write—without the lesson fee.

Try it yourself

The same idea works for any recurring, plan-shaped job. The closest shipped starting point is the Personal Trainer template, which takes your goals, feedback, and the sets you actually completed and hands you the next session. Replace barbells with bar numbers and it's the same loop: you do the work, the Routine does the thinking.

Source: Personal Trainer template

# Practice Plan · 3–9 August 2026

## This week's target
Solidify F minor (hands together at 72 bpm) and learn Chopin bars 1–16 with dynamics.

## Monday (legato & evenness)
- 5 min: F minor scale, hands separately, legato, metronome 60. Listen for even tone.
- 10 min: Czerny No. 45, bars 9–16. Metronome 80, two-note slurs.
- 10 min: Chopin, RH alone bars 1–8. Count aloud; mark the breaths.
- 5 min: Sight-read a Grade 2 piece from the book.