Micro-Practicing: How to Make Progress in Just 5 Minutes
1. Small but Mighty
For many players, fitting practice around life isn’t always simple. 2018 turned out to be one of the busiest years I’ve ever had. I was running a music school, juggling teachers and students who needed my attention, while also personally teaching more than 40 students each week. At the same time, I was performing far more frequently than I do today. This meant that although I definitely needed to practice, finding time to do so was much more difficult. It usually ended up happening in short bursts between lessons or whenever a teaching room happened to be free.
For many players, sitting down at the piano for just 5 minutes doesn’t feel worth it. It can seem too small to make any impact. However, from my experience in those moments where I only had 5 minutes between lessons, these can be some of the most impactful practices you’ll ever do.
In a longer practice session there are usually many things you want to achieve. You might run through some weak scales, do a bit of sight-reading, and push forward with pieces you’re learning. In reality though, long practice sessions are really just made up of many smaller activities.
For example, a longer session might look like this:
• 10 minutes on scales
• 10 minutes on sight-reading
• 20-30 minutes on pieces
But really, it breaks down more like this:
Scales
• D major scale - 3 minutes
• B minor scale(s) - 4 minutes
• A major scale - 3 minutes
Sight Reading
• 4 x sight-reading exercises - 2.5 minutes each
Pieces
• Bar 4 staccato in piece 1 - 3 minutes
• Finger pattern in bar 7 of piece 1 - 4 minutes
Etc.
As you can see, while a practice session on the surface might be made up of three elements, it is actually made up of many tasks that usually take under 5 minutes to complete. On the days where you only have 5 minutes, the trick is to be very specific, very quickly. You might jump straight in and solve one problem in a piece or play two sight-reading exercises. Whatever you decide is the most important task is the one you should work on.
2. Why Micro-Practice Works
Studies have shown that for learning, consistency is much more valuable than intensity. The person who practices for 10 minutes per day will far surpass the person who practices for 5 hours in one sitting each month.
This is because the break between practices is just as important for learning as the practice itself. If we take brushing your teeth as a comparison: brushing daily helps maintain and clean your teeth. If you brushed them for 5 hours once a month, there would likely be no teeth left to brush! The regularity of your practice reduces the “forgetting curve” and builds your muscle memory and synaptic connections.
Practicing for just 5 minutes also means you have to get very good at addressing the problem straight away. With longer practice sessions, there is much more room for inefficiency. For example, you might play through the piece several times or practice scales you can already play. In a short session, you learn to get straight into the most important thing.
While doing more in a day is generally better, the improvements are not linear. The longer the practice session, the more marginal the improvement becomes. This is for a few reasons, your focus reduces and your brain is already saturated with information. This means that in shorter practices you are still making most of the improvement, especially if you are focused. Playing with limited time can even sharpen your overall ability to practice so that when you do have more time, you use it more effectively.
3. The Benefits
Shorter practice sessions can also be beneficial in ways longer sessions can’t.
Sometimes, motivation wavers and it can be hard to make yourself sit at the piano for 30+ minutes. Allowing yourself to just do 5 minutes and focus on one task is a great way of keeping momentum and continuing to build the habit of daily practice. Often, once you are already sitting at the piano and start playing, you will keep going for longer anyway. Giving yourself permission to only do one thing removes that mental barrier.
Knowing that you can still make progress by breaking your practice up throughout the day also helps you fit it into a busy schedule without feeling guilty about not finding more dedicated time to a longer session.
These shorter practices force you to focus and give you clarity on what matters most. Some of my most useful sessions have been those moments where I only had a few minutes but concentrated on solving a single issue. If you did this three times in a day, that would be 15 minutes of laser focus. Compare that with 15 minutes spent running through scales you already know and playing through a piece.
Each time you focus on solving a problem at the piano, no matter how long the session, you are making small deposits into your jar of skills. Over weeks and months, these deposits build into big breakthroughs. No matter how much time you have, keep moving forward. Your future self will thank you.
Matthew Cawood
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