Timing of practice: How long and how often does it take

Timing is crucial

Starting from very limited skill level is a very emotionally taxing experience. The task ahead of us seems insurmountable and every step we take seems to take us no closer to our goal. This leads many people to give up before they even get started. But if we know how long to expect, we can be sure even the smallest step is a real progress in the right direction. These steps accumulate and when we look back it seems impossible we were ever able to travel the distance.

There are two broad questions we want to know:

1. How long will it be until our performance improves so that we can be fluent enough to do meaningful work?
2. How often and how long should my practice sessions be?

Each of these larger questions contain additional puzzles such as:

1. Can we break the larger goal into subgoals?
2. What happens when we take a break from practice?
3. Does it matter what time of day we practice?
4. and so on….

The bad news is that we don’t know the precise answer to any of these questions. But the good news is that we have a very good idea about the rough parameters based on the shared experiences of many different types of people over many disciplines. And it seems that as long as you stick within them, you can be confident of success.

The other good news is that there is a lot of scope for you to modify a programme that fits your situation as long as you stick to the basic principles..

Total amount of time: 10,000 vs 20 hours

How long does it take to develop fluent expertise? The scary number that was made popular by Malcolm Gladwell is 10,000 hours over about 10 years [REF]. That is a more or less correct number for people at the top of their field.

But can you develop enough fluency to be able to perform adequately at a skill where you start with nothing in less time? Or can you overcome a plateau of performance in less time?

The answer to those questions is yes. And the number made popular by Josh Kaufman [REF] is 20 hours. That is about the amount of time of real practice in which you can:

1. Learn to run 5 kilometers from nothing
2. Learn to play a few songs on a musical instrument
3. Learn to touch type
4. Learn to speak enough of a foreign language to talk about yourself or order food in a restaurant
5. Learn to read confidently in another alphabet (Russian or Greek)

Now, this is not 20 hours in classes, or 20 hours of reading. It is 20 hours of concerted practice. But it means that is you practice for 30 minutes 5 times a week, you can achieve meaningful progress in 4 - 8 weeks.

Which is why many programmes we mentioned are spread over about 8 weeks. You can probably compress this into as little as 4 weeks and expand it to 12 weeks but this is a good benchmark.

Also, there’s nothing precise about 20 hours. Couch to 5K probably adds up to about 16 hours of running, an introductory language learning session may be closer to 30 hours.

If you are not starting from absolute scratch and you just want make progress with a component of a larger skill, you could probably even make meaningful progress over 3-6 hours over about 2 weeks. This is how long it may take a musician to truly master a new song, for example.

So, here are some recommendations for how to allocate time to developing or improving performance improvement:

1. For your larger goals, allocate anywhere between 15 and 30 hours over 8 to 12 weeks; this will be about 1.5 and 4 hours a week over 3 to 5 days.
2. You could probably compress this into a 4 week period by practicing about an hour a day. Some skills are more amenable to this than others but there are limits. Practicing 30 hours for a week will not let you develop your skills as 30 hours over 2-3 months.
3. Do not try to set goals for much further into the future than 12 weeks. In fact, you may benefit from splitting your 8-12 week programmes into shorter sprints to give you enough of a chance to evaluate your progress.
4. For your smaller learning goals, allocate into anywhere between 3 and 6 hours over 2-3 weeks; this will be about 1.5 to 3 hours a week
5. You should probably schedule some rest days and give yourself time to consolidate.
6. Some of the time should be spent reflecting and recalibrating goals. Whether that time counts as practice will depend on the type of activity. Thinking about running goals and form will help you improve very little, thinking about music, chess or writing in a targeted way may actually contribute to improved performance. But it should probably not be much more than about 10% of your overall time spent on the activities.

Note: The times above are based on what is a sensible time commitment for most people who are serious about improvement. They are consistent with what people report but we do not have systematic evidence that would let us be more specific.

The times will vary based on your current level of skill. Complete novices may see quick improvement over shorter periods of practice time but will not be able to benefit from cramming more time into a shorter span.

People closer to the peak performance may only see very little improvement after a lot of effort. But they will often be able to achieve that improvement by adding more practice time to every day.

For example, a beginner musician may be able to play a few songs at a satisfactory level after 20 hours of practice spread over a month in a way that they would not be able to if they crammed 30 hours into the first week. But a professional musician may require 20 hours just to perfect one section of a larger song to a public performance standard. But they may be able to achieve that improvement by practicing 3 hours a day for a week.

Practice session length

The next question we should answer is how long should individual practice sessions be. The recommended number varies but 30 minutes is a good starting point. It is sufficiently short for most people to be able to focus and sufficiently long that a meaningful amount of work can be done.

However, even practice sessions as short as 10 minutes can make a significant contribution to improvement. Particularly if the skill being practiced is more of a building block. Memorising vocabulary or practicing forms or scales are all things that can be done in 10-minute increments over the course of a day.

But even some aspects of writing can be done in 10 minute increments. In fact, being able to do something in just 10 minutes, may in itself be a skill to develop [REF - Ninja writing].

In the initial stages, you will definitely benefit more from two 30 minute practice sessions over two days than one 60 minute session and then skipping a day. People often talk about the consolidation that happens during sleep. That is plausible but we do not know for certain.

However, there are other types of activities that require sustained focus for longer than 30 minutes or at least several 30-minute blocks with short breaks between. This is important particularly for activities where so called ‘flow’ is a desired state. This will be particularly important for writing where scheduling 90 min writing sessions will be an important part of the process.

But remember, we need to distinguish between doing ‘work’ for 90 minutes and practicing with purpose for 90 minutes. Simply repeating a task does not lead to an improvement after a while. In fact, it seems that after people reach a plateau, they regress slightly if they just continue to repeat what they learned.

Plateau is a negative word but we can also think about it as reaching the level you need to perform at high enough quality and with sufficient fluency to reach your goal. This is fine. But often external circumstances change something about the environment or your aims and desires change and the current level won’t be enough.

This is where many people feel like they reached the end of their potential but with focused reflective practice, they can almost always break through the plateau and improve (even if only a little bit).

If you find yourself in this situation, you will often benefit from working in shorter sessions but with more focus on improving performance.

Practice times and routines

What is the best time of day to practice? As with all of these questions, there is a relatively simple answer but with much variation.

The simple answer is, practice whenever you can get the most out of the allocated time. That’s when you can focus the most. For many people that is early in the morning but for some late at night.

Right after lunch or an intensive meeting, your energy is probably depleted so that you won’t get the most out of your practice session. Particularly for writing, it is best to do your practice session before you did your reading - or in other words, read the day before, make notes, but when you start practicing your writing, start before you had a chance to set your thoughts in many different directions.

Of course, one of the things you are practicing could be overcoming tiredness and distraction. Athletes talk about learning to ‘run on tired legs’. You can use the same attitude for developing skills to work during times of day that is not the best for you. Develop switching muscles.

You should have a reliable practice routine at the time that suits you best but you should not be so dependent on that routine that even the smallest disruption to it will stop you from practicing. Because when it comes down to it any practice time is better than none.