Yes, exactly... two cues per exercise and per session is about right.
Sometimes I'll choose one or two, feel that I've nailed them pretty well after a set or two, and move on to another focus. Other times if I feel I've nailed it during the session, I'll continue to focus on that aspect to really cement it in. And sometimes I can't make any headway on the focus area, or it's like herding cats -- you improve in one area and something else gets away from you.
Interesting tidbit for those who track heart rate variability (HRV) -- on days that my score shows parasympathetic dominance, I find that I get much better feedback from body to mind. Sympathetic dominant days are more like "punch the clock and get it done" sessions. So the parasympathetic days are really productive in making changes and adjustments, really focusing on techniques and cues for improvements.
One thing to remember is that you have to come back to everything. I remarked one time that it's like tightening screws... you get one thing too tight and you have to back off somewhere else, or correspondingly tighten somewhere else, to get it all locked down right.
Also, your body changes over the months and years that you practice, so some cues work better at different stages of development.
So many reasons that each session is a practice...
Aside from the HRV stuff, which I haven't used, most of this reflects my own experience. As Dan John says, "You can't think your way through a ballistic lift," so you have to keep your focus tight and simple during the lift -- both on any cues you focus on executing, and in monitoring and assessing how well you are executing them.
Then it becomes an ongoing process of addressing different pieces of the whole. "Herding cats" and "tightening screws" are good metaphors, or "playing whack-a-mole."
I like that Anna's post ends with the overall idea of practice, because to me this process is the essence of practice. I often see two aphorisms about practice that I strongly disagree with: "practice makes permanent" and "perfect practice makes perfect."
To me, practice is a laboratory and a learning experience. So practice is always evolving -- the opposite of permanent.
And I have never done anything perfect or perfectly, so I'm not sure what "perfect practice" would be like.
In my experience, one of the most productive aspects of practice is having "happy accidents," those reps or sets where everything just seems to go right (maybe not "perfect," but a different level of "good").
Happy accidents can occur randomly, as a result of trying to implement specific cues, or as a result of experimentation (trying out something a little different instead of trying to do the same thing better -- and a failed experiment can be just as instructive as a successful one.). Then, when a happy accident occurs, I try to reverse engineer it. What did I just do? How was it different than what I was doing before? Can I replicate it? Can I replicate it consistently? What cue(s) might help me to replicate it consistently?
To answer the OP's question, I think the biggest thing I focus on during any drill (but especially ballistics) is "how does it feel?" Then I try to focus on some aspect of the answer. What felt good? (Let's try to do that again!) What felt not so good? (Fix that!) I tend to make my adjustments from rep to rep and set to set flexibly, based on this "feel" assessment more than specific cues I have in mind to start with (although I often use those too). I think I have enough experience, and have internalized enough cues and good technique, to quickly switch focus from one thing to another -- which is NOT the same as consciously focusing on more than one or two things at a time.
