Get better by practicing less?

Marketing guru Seth Godin recently wrote a small but very engaging blog post suggesting that users/customers/yourself could possibly achieve more by setting limits. One of his examples is this:

“The maximum number of tweets per day is 30.”

His point/opinion is that we might be more likely to achieve our goals if the end result is fixed and not some elusive, amorphous thing that allows us to just stop when we want to.

Godin is brilliant, in my humble opinion, and everything he writes usually gets a significant portion of my brain power for a while every day. This particular post got me thinking about my guitar practice sessions and which ones have ended up being the most successful for me.

So as it relates to guitar, Godin’s question becomes this: if you actually imposed a time limit on your practice sessions, will you accomplish more than if you sat down at the guitar to practice with unlimited time?

First, we’re going to have to go under the assumption that you have a practice goal in mind. Just sitting down and noodling on the guitar, whether you have an imposed time limit or not, is unproductive. It’s certainly fun as hell, but you probably won’t accomplish much.

Okay, so with that out of the way, the issue at hand is one of productivity, focus, and motivation. With a fixed time limit you obviously only have a certain amount of time in which to achieve certain milestones. In this scenario you will be focused and concentrating on exactly what needs to be worked on. Time won’t be wasted on whatever comes to the front of your mind, and you’ll know whether or not you are spending too much time (or not enough) on any specific piece of practice material.

In essence this is a very good thing. However, the downside is that you can very easily find yourself running out of time and rushing to get to everything you set out to do. That’s bad, perhaps even worse than having too much time.

Too much time, consequently, can be very good… if you have the ability to remain completely focused for long periods of time. Most of us can’t, so the potential to drift off into other things and noodle around is high. I can remember hundreds – perhaps even thousands – of practice sessions where I had unlimited time to do something important and ended up just riffing around and doing nothing.

So let’s get back to the original question; will you accomplish more with an imposed time limit?

My answer? I think for the majority of us the answer is “yes.” Since most of us are not hyper-focused OCD zombies it seems more likely that practice sessions with specific time limits is the way to go. There is a minority of people, however, who can practice for eight hours a day straight and be more productive than those of us spending twenty minutes. (Kudos to those people, for sure.)

Whichever end of the spectrum you may fall on, my suggestion as always is to make sure your practice sessions are focused and on point. What do you guys think about Godin’s point?