Guitar & Musician Forums

I found this chart online providing a guide for the right level of practice to musically improve with your insturment
Personally I think the sweet spot is going to be 20-40 minutes as that is generally realisitic for people to fit in within their daily lives. This is also more likely to be sustainable and allow for decent progression over time.

What does everyone think about the "right" amount of practice?

Take a 5 minute break every hour! Every 3 hours take 15 minutes and leave the practice room.

Strictly 100% accuracy, with good control of tone. Work up speed slowly, and log your metronome settings.

Avoid washing dishes, hand-creams, modern soaps/gels, and keep nails filed perfectly. File even the sides of fingers to get them smooth! Hands get dirty, and sometimes you can’t avoid washing - use white spirit to properly dry and harden. Or use a cordless hair-dryer.

All equipment, playing surfaces, picks, cables etc must be free of grease and sweat. Keep dry white wipes handy.

Repair blisters with superglue, and keep going!

Use the Royal College of Music books - Scales and Arpeggios grades 1-5, and 6-8. This will help you to get basic grounding in reading music.

Allot one hour of your practice day for free playing. Make a note of any intended gear changes, or future purchases, but then return to the stricter exercises. Any messing with gear is done outside regular practice time. During free play, now’s the chance to rip out some blistering arpeggios, and explore the different harmonic tonalities of fast pull-offs and sweeping.

Expand reading skills by buying something like Fernando Sor’s complete guitar works in notation. Avoid tab if possible. Set aside 30 mins a day purely for this.

Any equipment anomalies, then revert to un-plugged electric with metronome. Fix it later.

Never finish a session with free playing and lots of bends. An hour of grade 8 scales and arpeggios at fast speed is best to finish with.

All the hard work is done with alternate picking. Use free time to develop where you can sweep and economy pick that stuff. But never lose sight of how good the alternate-picking training was.

After 3 months of 8-hour days, you will see vast improvement from rigid discipline.
You should have a good idea about sweeping and economy picking, and where it can be used for mind-bending speed on some of the 3-octave Royal College fingerings. But don’t forget the 2-octave ones, and the prissy YouTube guys stuff. Use it all.
String-skipping is also important, so begin to explore that - but still with the discipline of earlier practice.

By now, your fingertips should be hammering clean notes wherever they fall, even the first finger. Play for 30 mins with a hairband on the 1st fret, and practice purely left-hand legato up and down until it is crystal clear.
Also practice pedal playing this way.

Take an average YouTube caged 2-octave scale. Play the notes on the 6th string, then the 4th, then the 5th, then 3rd etc.
This can make musical sense, and you can try it with all hammer-ons or pull offs too.

By now you can alternate pick through the whole grades 6-8 book in 90-minutes - playing each scale/arpeggio 3 times.
Begin and end future sessions with this. Lose the book eventually, and rely on a written list after that.

The times you feel you are playing your best, is the time to work on the most difficult stuff.
If at any time you feel you are treading water, then either up the metronome speed, or consider a different career in which motivation is stronger! An early end to a day’s practice should be followed by a long session the next day.