Pillar #1: Technique and Vocabulary

Whatever you practice all the time is what you'll get good at doing — this forms your vocabulary. That's why music theory & rhythm must be part of everything you do, the whole time.

There are no finger combinations or finger movements you'll ever need to make that don't already line up to some scale that sounds the way you want your music to sound, so it's counterproductive to start "unmusical" with purely "chromatic" exercises and then work extra to figure out how to make it all musical.

The trick to saving lots of time is to program "informed," musical muscle memory from the very start.

Your overall technique and your vocabulary affect everything in the next 2 Pillars (Improvisation and Songwriting):

So, obviously you'll want your overall technique and a working vocabulary to be well in order before you step out onto the world stage and potentially embarrass yourself.

That is not to say you have to be the ultimate shredder before you release anything (that really depends on your Vision for yourself), but whatever you do release, it must consist of you doing it well.

Developing various techniques ultimately will establish vocabulary. It also establishes motor memory, which leads to vocabulary you can use on auto-pilot when improvising as well as when songwriting & recording.

The more familiar your vocabulary, the faster you'll be able to play it because each successive movement will be more instinctive so you won't have to think it through in as much detail. And by practicing your vocabulary specifically for speed training, you'll develop your technique to a very high level of control.

By always pushing your abilities to write songs and record in order to create new music, you'll always have a clear picture of what's on the top of the technique priority list because you'll know which things need work before you can finally arrive at a "keeper" version of what you're writing, and that in turn will directly add to your vocabulary. And the better you can play (ie, your technique), the more interesting and impressive both your improvisation and your songwriting will be able to be.

On top of that, the better you can improvise consistently well, the more quickly you can create and record new music, so your productivity in the studio goes through the roof.

This is why, when you practice your instrument, you should make specific techniques the primary focus of each segment of your practice session, with the secondary focus being which scale(s), arpeggio(s), or other interval pattern it's based on ("how you color it in," essentially), with the Rhythmic Theme of the Day Strategy as an underlying theme that varies from day to day, so that everything you practice is rhythmically compatible — this is essential for building a working vocabulary.

Now, there are a lot of different individual techniques that exist, which makes it very hard to keep track of them all. To make it a little easier, I've attached a mind map that breaks down techniques by which hand plays them. 

You can always refer to it whenever you're drawing a blank or if you don't want to accidentally miss anything, but even without referring back to it, thinking of which hand performs which technique should help make your job at least 50% easier.