okay, when your comfortable with solving with eyes open, learn the memo. thats exactly what i did. and remember when you actually attempt, take as long as you need. you ever hear of bob burton from cubewhiz? his first try took him over 80 minutes! some people get over 30 but its succesful
the first success I timed took about 18 minutes. The first actual solve I did was probably over 25.
Before I did my first solve, I used to practice execution by writing down the memo, however you do it (AE FX GL etc) and solving the cube under a table or towel while reading the memo. You could do this for corners and edges separately at first, then try together. After you are comfortable doing the actual solve without looking at the cube, you could then progress to trying to fully memorize edges and then solve just the edges blindfolded. Then do corners on their own, then try both.
At first, do not even worry about time, like Gparker said, just take as long as you need. Getting faster just happens the more you do.