What to Do When You Have Just a Few Minutes to Practise

What do you do when you get a spare few minutes each day?

For example, when waiting for the kettle to boil, dinner to cook, or the husband/wife to finally stop faffing, etc.

Most people tend to check their phones or potter about but…

When you get a spare minute, I recommend you grab your guitar and play something.  

This is a reason why I like to keep my guitar out on a stand.

A few quick blasts like this each day where otherwise you’d just be “killing time” can be great for your playing.

There is some good science behind the benefits of learning in small doses like this.

I never knew what to do when I was learning, so I just ended up wasting lots of time.

When teaching though, I didn’t want my students to NOT know what to practise.

So, at the end of each lesson…

I would give the student a little note in their notebook with some “challenges” for them to practise.

For them, it made practise fun and varied and…

Each week I’d write something different.

A good thing you can do is make a list of 20 specific things that you have practised over the last 6-12 months and…

Challenge yourself to improve on them when you have a minute or two each day.

Make the challenges specific. For example, some could be:

• Can you improve the G to C chord change?
• Can you remember the minor pentatonic scale?
• Can you play a Travis picking pattern?

Keep this list next to your guitar.

When you get a few minutes, pick something random off the list and practise it for two minutes.

Even if you are the sort of player who likes to have one long steady practice session, you can still break up your session with little challenges like this, and…

Create your list, but if you are unsure what challenges you can do, you can use the ones in my membership programme.

Inside, there are over 30 (plus a new one each month).

Simply print off the list of challenges and when you get a spare minute, give one a go.

If you are unsure of the technique, each challenge comes with a short video explaining it all.

They are fun and a more productive way of “killing” time than checking your phone.

You can find out more about these “Two-minute challenges” below.

The two-minute challenges – what to do when you have just a few minutes to practise

Happy fingerpicking!

Dan Thorpe

Guitar Domination

P.S. This post was originally taken from Dan Thorpe’s private email list. To get blog posts like this sent to you which are full of great tips to make fingerpicking, strumming, and learning guitar more enjoyable (especially if you are over 40) join Dan’s list. It’s 100% free, HERE.