Guitar Practice Log: Free Template and What to Write

Most guitarists have started a practice journal at some point. Most of those journals stop within two weeks.

It is not a discipline problem. The template was too big. Tempo, bars covered, fingering, what went wrong, tomorrow's goal — filling all of that in takes three minutes after a twenty-minute session. Do that every day and logging becomes more work than playing.

Download the template (free, no signup)

A sheet with nothing on it but the four fields described below. Take it now and read the rest later if you like.

• Printable PDF (A4, one page, 12 rows) → download
• Spreadsheet CSV (opens in Excel or Google Sheets) → download

For Google Sheets use File → Import; Excel opens it directly. Keep row 1 (the column names) and delete row 2, which is the worked example.

The short version four fields

Twenty seconds once you are used to it. Before you add a fifth field, ask whether next week's version of you will read it. If not, do not write it.

If you want to track tempo, put it inside "what to do next" rather than giving it its own column. Write "F to G alone at 70 BPM" and next week you will know whether 80 happened. A dedicated tempo column goes blank on every day you did not set one, and blank columns are how these things start to collapse.

Why logging works at all

Two reasons, both about memory rather than motivation.

Starting the next session. Without a log, picking up the guitar begins with "what should I do today?" After three days off, you will not remember where you got stuck — so you play something you can already play, from the top, and that is the session. One line about the sticking point removes that entirely.

Progress on guitar is invisible day to day. The difference between yesterday's playing and today's is below the threshold you can hear. So a month in it feels like nothing changed, and that is where most people quit.

A log is what makes it visible. If a note from a month ago says "every string buzzes on F," you can check that against today. The thing you cannot feel, the writing remembers for you. For why practice stops sticking more broadly, see Why Guitar Practice Doesn't Stick (And How to Fix It).

What an entry looks like

Paper or spreadsheet, this is enough:

2026-08-09 / 25 min
Worked on: Wonderwall, verse into chorus
Stuck: bar 12, F to G lands late
Next: F to G alone at 70 BPM, 5 minutes

As a spreadsheet, five columns (the CSV above is exactly this):

Do not add a "how it went" column. A field that only ever contains "hard" or "okay" tells you nothing when you read it back.

What to leave out

Journals that die usually contain some of these:

• A goal field filled in before you play. You often do not know what you are doing until you start, so it ends up blank, and rows of blanks feel like failure. It looks similar to "what to do next," but that one is written immediately after playing, while looking at the spot that just defeated you — which is why it actually gets filled in
• Minute-by-minute breakdowns. Warm-up 5, scales 10, song 15 — almost nobody's real session matches the plan
• Long reflections. If you will not read it tomorrow, do not write it today
• Scoring yourself out of 10. Your scale drifts week to week, so the numbers cannot be compared later. Marking how a session felt is fine as a way to find entries again, but it is not a measure of progress

Three reasons logs stop, and what to do

You are writing it after you finish

The most common one. When you put the guitar down you are either tired or satisfied, and neither state makes you want to open a notebook.

Fix: write the sticking point at the moment you get stuck, into whatever notes app is already on your phone. Opening a dedicated logging tool mid-session is enough friction to kill it. Tidying it up later is optional.

You are trying to log every day

Make "every day" the goal and the first missed day feels like the streak is over and the whole thing is pointless. In reality, logging twice a week still does the job of getting you started faster next time.

Fix: use a format where gaps are fine. (This is where paper notebooks quietly fail — skipped dates look wrong on the page.)

The pile of entries never shows you anything

Nobody re-reads three months of notes from the beginning. A log you never read back eventually stops feeling worth writing.

Fix: have totals and a rough picture of which days you played appear on their own. This is the one place where paper and a plain spreadsheet genuinely fall short.

Paper, spreadsheet, or app

If paper is working for you, keep using paper. Most of the value is in handing the sticking point to your future self, and paper does that fine.

Switching tools earns its keep when you hit the third failure above — when you want totals over time, or want to know how many hours actually went into one song. Adding that up by hand is not realistic, and that is where an app starts to matter.

What this looks like in Fret Days

Here is my own app, Fret Days, with the awkward parts included. It needs a free account (no card).

The log screen takes five things:

The songs you can pick come from your song list, and the free plan caps that list at 20 songs — a bigger repertoire than that needs PRO.

Of the four fields, "where you got stuck" and "what to do next" go into the memo as two lines rather than having dedicated boxes.

Reasons you might not want this one:

• You can only backfill seven days. I told you above to pick a format where gaps do not matter, and this is where my own app is strictest — you cannot sit down and enter a fortnight at once. The limit keeps the log close to what actually happened, but it does not suit people who review monthly
• It is not the right place for mid-session notes. The log screen requires a duration, so your phone's notes app is faster for capturing a sticking point the moment it happens. If you do collect them there, copy them across within seven days or the backfill limit locks you out
• The free plan shows the last 90 days in detail. Older entries are not deleted, but seeing all of it requires PRO
• There is no export yet. The table above says apps make it hard to get your data out; this one is not currently an exception

Using the metronome adds that time to your log automatically, which covers the most common failure — forgetting to log at all. (The metronome itself is free with no time limit.)

Worth pairing with this

If you only track time, you lose sight of whether your repertoire is actually growing. That side of it is covered in How to Keep Track of Which Songs You Can Actually Play.

Once you are reliably recording where you got stuck, the next question is how to clear those spots. If timing is the culprit, see Guitar Timing Exercises: Metronome on the Offbeat. If the session structure itself needs work, How Long Should You Practice Guitar Each Day? covers that.

Summary

• Four fields: time, what you worked on, where you got stuck, what to do next
• The sticking point is the real content — it is a note to your future self
• Put tempo inside "what to do next" instead of giving it a column
• Skip goal fields, minute breakdowns, long reflections, and self-scoring
• Capture the sticking point in your phone's notes app as it happens
• Twice a week is fine. Pick a format where gaps do not matter
• If paper works, keep it. Switch when you want totals you cannot add up by hand

The template above (PDF / CSV) is just those four fields laid out. Fill in one week of it and see.

See how Fret Days works →

Written by the developer of Fret Days, a guitar practice-tracking app. The recordable fields, character limits, backfill window, free-plan viewing period, and the absence of an export feature were all checked against the implementation. (An earlier draft of this article described two input fields that had already been removed from the app; that was caught in review before publication.) The paper/spreadsheet/app comparison is not a claim that one is better — each row lists where that option is weak.

Published: 2026-08-09