When first starting out I used a practice hand and kept practicing full sets and timing myself. What you're doing is the same as sports stars and others who need to practice all the time for what they do...creating muscle memory. Your body gets used to moving in certain ways and gets more efficient every time. Plus, when you practice, and go to sleep at night, your brain works on improvements and each day you get better-there's science behind this.
Always keep a little clock next to you when you work on people. When you're practicing, use a stopwatch. Figure out a procedure for your service. By this I mean, which nail you are going to start with, like the client's right pinky finger, and which step you want to start with, like removing polish is step number one. Then you do step number one from their right pinky and on every nail to their left pinky (so all 10 nails). Then you do step two on all 10 nails, then step 3 on all 10 nails, etc. Once you get your procedure down, however you want to do it, you keep practicing that, over and over, until you get your time down.
Then, once your time is great on regular full sets, or whatever you want to improve upon, practice for stilettos, or full sets with gel polish and nail art. You will get faster, it takes the practice. And if no one is willing to hire you to get your practice on actual clients (which is a little unfair in my opinion) then do the practice on fake hands. It really helped me get from my first full set in school at 6 hours to 2 hours at my first job, and now I can do a full set of pink and whites in 1 hour and hope to get even faster
Tammy Taylor gives great advice on becoming faster by following a set procedure:
Tammy Taylor - Nails that have problems for Nail Tech's
Check it out, it's a great example of how you can look at your timing in terms of what to accomplish in blocks of time, what procedure to use, if you don't have one, yet... etc.
I hope this helps :wink2: