“I want to learn this or that, but I don’t have the time.” That is an excuse I have heard too often. I personally believe that you have got all the time in the world to learn something new if you really want it. The truth is just that you want other things more and prioritize accordingly. There is no shame in that, and you shouldn’t fool yourself. However, I want to find out how little time of daily practice you must invest to learn something new and become at least decent. My hypothesis is that it is possible to learn a new skill in just one minute of hyper-focused daily practice. One month ago, I started an experiment to find out.

I have been playing musical instruments for 15 minutes every day since 2014 and learning a new one every year. The results are clear as crystal to me: It is not the hours you put down in each session that matters, it is the consistency. In addition, the learning process is accelerating. So, 15 minutes is definitely enough, but for some people, even 15 minutes might be too much for their schedule. We need to aim even lower, and one minute is probably the lowest reasonable unit of time for anyone. Because if you can’t find one minute per day to do something you love, you are lying. If I were to pick up a new musical instrument and practice for one minute per day, I know I would succeed, because I already have so much experience in that domain. That’s why I wanted to test my hypothesis on a skill where I honestly can say that I start from zero: Drawing. I haven’t painted, sketched or drawn anything since I was back in school more than 20 years ago. An artist can illustrate his dreams and visions and bring them to life in a painting. That is something that I would love to be able to do. Also, to draw would be a wonderful skill to have as a teacher. Instead of worrying about copyright or looking for the perfect picture to illustrate your arguments and presentations, you could just do a quick sketch and create it yourself. This is my “why”.

My experiment goes like this: Every day, for one year, I select something in the spur of the moment and sketch it, with a 60 second timer. I am only allowed to spend one minute – no more, no less. I usually approach a skill acquisition challenge with a minimum time mindset, i.e. practice at least x minutes per day and if you are in the zone, keep going. But whatever you do, do not fail to miss a single day of minimum practice. This is how I believe it should be done. With my drawing project however, I wanted to test the effect of the upper limit as well. It also makes the results more interesting, because now I can specify exactly how much time I have spent with a pen in my hand. When you have such a well-defined time slot, I find it much easier to enter a trance-like state and completely focus on the task at hand. I also think it is very important to just do it “on the fly” and not plan it. For simplicity, I primarily use my iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil, but there are no restrictions. I have also used ball rolling pens and graphite pens on the back side of an envelope or an old letter. Just grab what you have and go. Keep it simple.

A couple of weeks into my project I realized that I needed some way to quantify progress. You can only do so much in one minute. Therefore, every month I will do a long session and paint without a timer, resulting in twelve milestone paintings in total. I now deeply regret however, that I didn’t do a day zero painting to document where I began. So, if you take on a similar challenge, don’t make this mistake. Anyway, the first month has passed and I have done my first milestone painting, shown above in the blog post. The process seems to be working. I found an abandoned car in the forest (see picture below) which made a great first object. If you are interested in this project, you can follow my daily progress on my Instagram or Facebook. I have also started a 12-episode podcast series on my Youtube channel where I present what I have learned each month in this project. The total time spent drawing at the time when I created the first milestone of the old car was 30 x 1 + 60 = 90 minutes. Not too bad for 1,5 hours of practice! It will be interesting to see where I will be in a year.

If you are inspired by this and decide to start a project on your own, please let me know. It would warm my heart. From what I can tell so far, one minute seems to be enough!

Can you acquire a new skill in just one minute per day?