You could call it the tamest of mid-life crises, but as I turned 40 last year, I decided to devote myself to a long-neglected ambition: learning the guitar. I dutifully set myself the task of practising for 30 minutes a day, with the aim of strumming my way through a songbook by my 41st birthday.
What stood in the way, of course, was life. With work and family commitments, I was lucky to find a free half-hour more than once or twice a week. Each day that went by without practice left me feeling more demotivated, and the guitar soon started gathering dust next to my piano.
Then I came across the idea of productivity snacking: splitting goals into bite-size chunks that we slot in between our other responsibilities. Looking into the research, I found that we can achieve far more in even tiny bouts of activity than we might imagine. Most importantly, those small wins can do wonders for our motivation, making us more likely to achieve our goals than if we had set tougher targets.
My first source of inspiration came from the world of physical fitness. Health guidelines advise that we do at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise a week. Yet many people struggle to meet this threshold. Some research even suggests that the mere existence of such an ambitious goal is actively discouraging. Put simply, they feel that if they cannot reach the recommended dose, they might as well not bother at all.
As a result, sports scientists started to consider ways of making fitness regimes more approachable by breaking them down into very short bursts of physical activity, lasting just a few minutes each, a practice that is sometimes known as "exercise snacking." If you're working from home, you might do a few press-ups after an hour of sitting at your desk; in the evening, you might jog on the spot during a break while you watch TV.
The results can be impressive. A recent review of the literature concludes that these very short bouts of exercise can improve a range of outcomes, and there's even new evidence that exercise snacking can enhance cognitive function. Crucially, these interventions have extremely low dropout rates, of just 12 percent, with the vast majority of people in each study continuing until the very end.
There are many reasons why breaking things down like this works. In terms of sheer practicality, it's easier to fit short exercises into the "between times" of the day rather than carving out a full hour. But there are also motivational benefits. Reams of research have shown that the mere act of dividing things into smaller chunks can help make an activity less daunting, so that we're less likely to procrastinate.
Finally, there's the "progress principle." Each small win enhances our self-efficacy, our belief in our capacity to enact personal change. By giving ourselves more easily achievable targets, we experience that confidence boost more often, a pleasant buzz that means we're more likely to repeat the behaviour.
The same principle extends well beyond fitness, into learning.
In education, meanwhile, short-and-sweet study sessions could help avoid "overlearning." That's a risk if you're lucky enough to make substantial progress in a single sitting: after that, the benefits may plateau, and further practice does very little to help cement the material for the future. This is why psychologists tend to encourage "spaced practice," consisting of briefer lessons separated by a suitable time interval. The extra effort involved in remembering what you learned at the last session helps your brain consolidate the knowledge.
As I discovered, it was surprisingly easy to apply this approach to the guitar. Over the course of a working day, there were lots of opportunities to pick up my instrument for a few minutes: in between interviews, as a quick morning or afternoon break, or as a small reward for finishing an article. It's not a replacement for extended sessions; sometimes, I really do need to immerse myself in a piece. But I find that I can make far better use of that time if I've kept my skills fresh with bite-size bursts of activity.
Perhaps most importantly, I've found that microdosing my musical goals is a pleasure in its own right. Learning an unfamiliar chord or finger-picking my way through a new melody leaves me more energised than scrolling on my phone, which is how I might have otherwise whiled away those odd moments. Whatever other frustrations I'm facing, I can look forward to the sense of achievement that comes from grabbing my guitar and making a little bit of progress. The productivity snacks are a treat in themselves.