Do you guys build yourself lesson plans or do you take a naturalistic approach to practice? I'm sort of a structured, nerdy thinker. A computer programmer and video gamer... I wonder if coming up with lesson plans for myself would be more productive than noodling. For example, I'm working on learning "Breaking the Law" and also working through the Blue's Series 1 (I've finished fundamentals 1 and 2 and feel pretty decent at that stuff). So I can burn an hour (like I did last night) of just working on this left hand fingering to get one particular part of the song to sound right. It feels almost too too honed in on a detail that might not matter. Specifically, getting the hand motion down from muting the strings for the crunch-crunch-chord crunch-crunch-chord crunch-chord part right after the intro bit.

Should I have a more structured lesson. 20 minutes of warmup, 30 minutes of X, 30 minutes of Y, etc? Or will I learn by just exploring different pieces? It isn't clear to me whether I should be focusing on learning a song and just really getting it down, or learning various techniques.

Part of me thinks that learning a song would be ideal. If I was going to teach someone to program, I would probably give them some basic knowledge, but try to get them to understand that only by implementing a program will they really solve problems. Learning techniques -- in code -- is pointless unless you are actually using them and realizing why they work the way they do in practice. Is guitar the same or is this a flawed analogy?

So should I sit down and write out some lesson plans, or should I just go where my interests lead me?