Four Approaches to Practice

The importance of Practice

“What do you do every day to improve that is similar to how a musician practices their scales?” interview question suggested by Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross in their book Talent.

Most people do not practice things to get better at them. They just do what they are doing when it comes to it and improve a little bit each time until they hit a plateau. This works for many things in life and allows us to get good enough at most things to the level we need to get by.

But there are many types of activities that simply require more focus and effort than just doing something now and again. Playing a musical instrument, speaking a foreign language, touch typing, writing and reading are some examples of activities where focused practice is essential to even get started. But most people stop practicing even here after they get good enough and never improve beyond a certain point.

There are four approaches you can take to practice.

1. Repetitive practice
2. Reflective practice
3. Purposeful practice
4. Deliberate practice

I ordered them here by how effective they are to help you overcome the limitations of working memory to increase fluency. But the biggest jump is in going from repetitive practice to reflective practice. In fact, reflective practice is something that you can do all the time, purposeful and deliberate practice may not always be an option.

1 Repetitive practice

Repetitive practice is when you just try to repeat something many times in sequence to get better at it. For example, when you repeat a word many times to try to remember it or when you study for an exam. This is better than nothing but it has severe limits.

Apart from being boring, simply repeating things over and over does not let you combine things into bigger chunks. It also relies on having some aptitude or prior knowledge. Which is why people often give up when they try to learn something by rote and say “I’m just not very good at it.” But in fact, their attitude should be:

But sometimes we don’t even do that much and we just rely on getting better at something by doing it multiple times. We call that experience but we should be cautious about assuming pure experience is enough to continue improving. This can be best summarised by this quote from Stephen Covey (author of the famous book ‘7 Habits of Highly Effective People’):

2 Reflective practice

Adding reflection to repetition is what makes your practice reflective. That is when you focus on the task you’re trying to practice and try to identify what chunks you could create to reduce the demands on working memory and what are the most effective ways of practicing to develop those chunks.

Advantage of reflective practice

The advantage of reflective practice over purposeful or deliberate practice is that you can do it all the time. You can do much of it in your head and add in repetition when you have time.

Reflective practice is what people who are good at what they do engage in all the time. That is how they can keep improving and exploring new areas. They are constantly thinking about what they do, how it all fits together and how to improve what they do - even just a little bit. This means that when they come to actually perform the action, they’re focused on the improvement. And that makes it easier for them to develop chunks or mental representations.

Disadvantage of reflective practice

The disadvantage is that your progress is uneven and takes much longer.

Also, this does require that you keep whatever you want to improve top of mind. If you are really interested in what you’re trying to get better at, you will always think about it. But if what you’re trying to improve at is just something you have to do, you will probably not do enough reflective repetition to truly improve.

This could be illustrated by another quote from Magnus Carlsen when asked for advice on how to get better at chess:

Most people cannot be sufficiently obsessed about most things, so they need more structured approach to improve.

3 Purposeful practice

Purposeful practice is when you set an exact target for improvement and schedule time slots over a period of time to get better at it.

Even if you main mode of improvement is reflective practice, you will need to insert some bouts of purposeful practice into the process. It is especially important at the beginning of learning any new discipline or if what you are learning requires fluency (such as writing).

To develop a block of purposeful practice to improve at something, you can proceed in 5 steps:

1. Identify what aspect of your performance you want to improve (think about moments when your fluency gets disrupted)
2. Break the performance into chunks that you can practice (these are not ‘real’ chunks, just ones that you can work on)
3. Decide on how you are going to measure improvement and/or get feedback on what you do
4. Practice in blocks of effort anywhere between 10 and 90 minutes depending on the type of task (30 minute blocks are a good default) for a total of between 6 and 20 hours depending on the level you are starting from
5. Review changes in improvement and reflect on how to fine-tune the practice work and the chunks you are trying to develop

The review is the last step on the list but you need to reflect on how things went after every practice session.

Purposeful practice is necessary to achieve a minimum level at some skills but it is also great for areas where you want to improve a little bit but that you don’t want to think about all the time.

On the other hand, if the process of purposeful practice sounds like too much work, you can always incorporate elements of purposeful practice into your general reflective practice. But you have to get into the habit of having frequent mental check-ins with yourself and taking the time to stop the flow you’re in and repeat a certain action in a focused way.

4 Deliberate practice

Deliberate practice is when you follow an established programme that is designed to increase your performance. Ideally, you do this with a coach but you always need to have a very good system of receiving feedback on your performance to help you focus your practice.

Deliberate practice in the strictest sense is not available to everyone and for any skill. These are the prerequisites:

1. Working in a discipline where it is easy to measure progress mostly along a single dimension.
2. Following a well-established programme of development that has had years of input based on the experiences of different people.
3. Working with an experienced coach who is at least at your level or one level above (unless there are good mechanisms of self-feedback)

A good examples of disciplines where deliberate practice (under different names) has been particularly successful are:

• Certain sports (particularly individual ones)
• Musical performance
• Chess
• Typing
• Memory

But elements of deliberate practice can be inserted into many other fields:

• Language learning
• Reading and writing
• Photography
• Programming
• Using computers
• Academic knowledge

The key is to find points where your performance starts to suffer because of the limitations of working memory.

Even though the Academic Writing Bootup calls itself deliberate practice, it is at heart a prescription for purposeful practice but with as much of deliberate practice inserted in as possible.