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I want to practice enough to get the satisfaction of learning pieces and playing them well, yet also to take care of my family and home, and to minimize fatigue. Also, I want to decide what is my overarching plan, my “light at the end of the tunnel,” so that when I practice one piece it is fitting into a bigger picture. When I was young, no one said, “We are going to learn Bach Preludes and Fugues so that then we can learn Mozart Sonatas, so that we can then better understand Beethoven Sonatas!” There was no program of learning, just, “Oh, you like this piece? Let’s learn it!” I had a large compendium of Romantic Piano Pieces, so most of my favorites came from this book. I learned some Bach Inventions, but they seemed mechanical and distant after the lushness of Chopin or Debussy. My handwriting indicates I played the first movement of Mozart’s F Major Sonata #2, K. 280 — but I was bored. Also a vague memory of the opening D fifths of Beethoven’s Pastoral Sonata, as well as my handwriting again, indicate I learned it — yet after playing Ravel’s Sonatine, these classical Sonatas bored me, and I didn’t understand their significance. In hindsight, I don’t think I had a good foundation in music theory, history, or an understanding of how pieces fit in. I was a good level 5-7 player, yet I was learning pieces out of historical and theoretical context, note by note, which is one reason why it took me so long to memorize pieces. I was memorizing note by note through muscle memory as well as by taking mental photographs of the sheet music.

https://mygrandpianolife.wordpress.com/2021/02/19/practice-how-much