One etude or one scale a day: a timer, the name of what you practiced, and the date. There is no hours total on this page and there never will be, because an hours counter would ship the exact false number the season spends eight episodes taking apart.
Before you start. Daily timed technical work at an instrument has a documented physical cost in hands and wrists, with two systematic reviews and one large survey behind it. The page will not encourage duration and does not reward it. If something hurts, stop, and the number on this page is not a reason to continue.
Today
0:00
Start it when you start, stop it when you stop.
No metronome score, no accuracy grade, no hours total. If you want to know whether it is working, listen to yourself in a month.
The log
The honest limit, stated first. The ten thousand hours was never a finding. The 1993 study everyone cites contains no such figure about its violinists, and the researcher whose paper it came from objected in print, in his own words, to what a journalist had made of it. A 2014 meta analysis put deliberate practice at a fraction of the variation in expert performance, a 2019 reanalysis lowered it again, and the only person in this season who made the transcendence claim himself is the man who printed it in italics in his own 1873 preface, at his own expense, with nothing behind it. What survives is smaller and firmer: timed daily technical work builds a specific motor skill, the etude literature is an excellent delivery system for it, and no amount of it has been shown to produce a musician.