When you are busy it can be good to find more effective ways of using your practice time. Fiona Berry from Learn Music Together runs two Facebook groups called Music Lessons & Practice: Learning & Understanding and Musician in the Making where she shares daily tips, ideas and videos from her experience as a music teacher, to help people improve their skills. In addition to answering questions in the groups, she also runs workshops & gives individual tuition sessions.
For example, when making mistakes many people either just ignore them & keep playing, or start a song again from the start. Instead, you should stop, examine where you’ve gone wrong & play that part through slowly several times until you can reliably play it correctly, working up to the correct speed for the song. Subsequently, when playing the piece you should return to the places that give you difficulty and play them a few times first, before going back to play the tune in full. This means you rehearse the tricky sections more frequently and it will become easier to play the entire song accurately & smoothly.
You can download Fiona’s free Practice Tips Guide with ten useful ideas to try out.
Written to suit any instrument, it’s particularly good if you are venturing into playing chord melody, as she gives several examples using sheet music, which would aid you to focus on the detail efficiently. But the suggestions also work well with songsheets or tab, as you can take small portions of a verse, chorus, riff or solo section and work on those individually where you are having issues with chord changes, rhythm or singing a melody.
People of Lewisham's Ukulele Club 