BartK The thing is that if I have too little going on I feel like I'm not making any progress. I have to have something new to work on. That's why I work on these smaller pieces that take me 1-2 weeks to finish. Perhaps that is my problem. I'm addicted to starting fresh new pieces all the time and the old ones get kind of pushed aside. Maybe I have to focus more for a while.
On the other hand, I'm a big fan of Molly Gebrian's ideas and she recommends working on many things at a time. I'm in a bit of a dilemma here.
For myself, I don’t have unlimited practice time. I have about an hour a day during the week, and I’ve found that if I’m working on a big stretch piece, it can be hard to have the bandwidth to focus on multiple pieces. I think if I had double the time, maybe I’d be able to manage more. However, what I often find when working on a longer piece is that I will start working on one section. Once that’s learned to an OK place, then I will move to another section — so to me, this feels like working on ‘something new,’ even thought it’s in the same piece. For the section(s) I’ve worked on already and are in my hands, I continue to work on those, but in a more ‘polishing’ way. So it’s kind of thinking of one piece as several projects in different stages of learning.
I think if you want to continue with additional, smaller pieces, I would try just blocking off time — I’m going to spend 20 minutes on fresh new pieces and 40 minutes on the big piece and see how you go (I just pulled out these numbers — whatever feels right to you and helps you keep a balance between progress and motivation). Also, at the beginning, since you’re working on less of the total piece, maybe you can do 20 minutes of the new big piece and 40 minutes of other, smaller pieces. Then as you progress, you can move to 20 minutes of ‘new material’ from your big piece, 20 minutes of ‘polishing’ things in the same piece, and 20 minutes of the shorter, fresh new pieces. Or something like that.
Also, I know you love Chopin! If you’re a fan of the Berceuse, I wonder if this might be a good piece to try. It’s 6 pages, so not very long, but it sounds like on the longer side of things you’ve been doing. I found this very natural to work in small pieces, because the variations are so short, and also because of this, it might be easier to work on other things at the same time.