For years, I tracked my practice the wrong way. I tracked minutes.
Tuesday: ninety minutes. Wednesday: two hours. Thursday: forty-five minutes (short session, felt guilty). The running total was my scorecard, and more was always better.
Then I learned about the energy investment model, and I realized that my scorekeeping had been not just useless but actively misleading. Because the ninety-minute session on Tuesday was less productive than the forty-five-minute session on Thursday — and I had no way of knowing, because I was measuring the wrong variable.
The variable that matters isn’t time. It’s focused cognitive energy. And focused cognitive energy doesn’t distribute evenly across a practice session. It concentrates at the beginning and evaporates as the session progresses.
The Three Zones
“Art of Practice” described practice energy in three distinct zones, and the description matched my experience so precisely that I wondered how I’d never noticed the pattern myself.
Zone one: high-value energy. This is the energy available at the very start of a session. Full focus. Full cognitive power. Maximum capacity for concentration, analysis, and adaptation. This energy “has the power to be used in order to overcome your current abilities and skill level.”
Zone two: good-value energy. This kicks in as the initial peak begins to fade — roughly the middle portion of a session. Focus is still present but declining. The capacity for complex, demanding work is reduced but not eliminated. This zone is still productive for challenging material, though not as potent as the peak.
Zone three: low-value energy. This is what remains after the first two zones are spent. “Neither focused nor active.” Practice in this zone is characterized by going through the motions — hands moving but mind wandering. “There’s usually neither awareness nor joy present, and it’s far from the productive, focused, active force it needs to be for effective progress.”
The revelation wasn’t that energy declines during practice. Everyone knows that. The revelation was how dramatically the quality of practice differs across these three zones, and what that implies about session structure.
The Investment Analogy
Think of your focused energy as money. At the start of each session, you have a fixed budget. You can’t earn more mid-session. You can’t borrow against tomorrow’s allocation. Whatever you have at the start is all you get.
Now: where do you invest it?
High-value energy invested in challenging new material produces high returns. The combination of peak focus and maximum difficulty creates the optimal conditions for adaptation — the mechanism that actually drives improvement.
High-value energy invested in comfortable routine material produces low returns. You’re spending your best cognitive resources on tasks that don’t challenge the adaptive mechanism. It’s like putting your savings in a checking account earning zero interest.
Low-value energy invested in challenging new material produces negative returns. You’re attempting difficult tasks without the focus required to execute them properly, which means you’re training your hands to do the wrong thing. Imprecise repetitions during depleted focus build neural pathways to imprecise execution.
Low-value energy invested in routine maintenance produces neutral returns. You’re doing something you already know how to do, without much focus, and the result is maintaining existing skill levels without improvement. Not great, but not harmful.
The optimal investment strategy is obvious once you see it: high-value energy goes to high-difficulty material. Low-value energy goes to low-difficulty material. Match the investment to the return.
Why I Was Bankrupting Myself
My old practice sessions were the equivalent of spending my investment budget at a casino and then trying to fund my retirement with pocket change.
I’d spend the first thirty minutes — my highest-value energy — on comfortable warm-up material. Techniques I’d mastered months ago. Routines I could perform in my sleep. This felt productive because my hands were moving smoothly and the results looked good, but I was investing premium energy in activities that generated zero improvement.
By the time I got to the challenging material, my energy budget was already half-spent. I was attempting the most difficult tasks with moderate energy at best. The result was mediocre practice of the material that needed my best practice.
And at the end of the session, when I was running on fumes, I’d sometimes attempt something new out of a sense of obligation. The last fifteen minutes, low-value energy, brand-new technique. The worst possible combination.
No wonder progress was slow. I was systematically misallocating my most valuable resource.
The Psychological Experiment
A psychological experiment I read about made the energy depletion concrete for me.
Participants were shown an emotionally charged movie and asked to suppress their emotional reactions — not to display any feelings on their faces. Afterward, they were given a simple cognitive task: matching similar colors.
The group that had suppressed their emotions performed dramatically worse on the color-matching task than a control group that had watched the same movie without suppressing reactions.
The original researchers — Roy Baumeister and colleagues, in work they published in 1998 — argued that suppressing emotions used the same cognitive resource as focused attention. The participants had depleted their willpower during the movie, and there wasn’t enough left for the subsequent task. (It’s worth noting that this “ego depletion” theory has faced significant replication challenges in recent years, with some researchers questioning whether the effect is as strong or as universal as originally claimed. But the practical observation — that cognitively demanding tasks earlier in a session leave less mental fuel for later ones — still matches what I experience in practice.)
Now extrapolate to practice. Every minute of your session depletes the same cognitive resource, regardless of how “easy” the task feels. Thirty minutes of comfortable warm-up isn’t free. It costs cognitive energy — the same energy you need for the challenging material that actually drives improvement.
This is why long practice sessions produce diminishing returns even when they feel productive. The first hour costs the same cognitive fuel as the second hour, but the second hour has far less fuel to spend.
What Naturals Do Differently
Naturals allocated their energy with almost perfect efficiency. They invested their peak energy in their most challenging material, then worked downward through difficulty as energy declined.
Once they pushed themselves over their current maximum skill level and used all their energy to get better at something they couldn’t do before, there was still energy left for practicing their routine. Coming from something much harder to something easier, it synced with their energy level. As physical energy dropped, the skills got easier and easier.
Some naturals took this even further — they stopped practicing entirely as soon as they hit the low-value range.
They didn’t just avoid investing low-value energy badly. They stopped investing it entirely. When the high-quality fuel was gone, they closed up shop.
This struck me as almost scandalously responsible. Stop practicing when you still have time? Walk away from the table when you’re still at the casino? The discipline required to stop while your hands still want to move is, paradoxically, one of the most demanding aspects of effective practice.
My Energy Audit
I started paying attention to my own energy zones. Not with a stopwatch — with awareness. When during my session did my focus begin to fade? When did I catch my mind wandering? When did the practice start feeling mechanical rather than engaged?
The answers were consistent: high-value energy lasted about twenty to twenty-five minutes. Good-value energy lasted another fifteen to twenty. After forty to forty-five minutes, I was firmly in the low-value zone.
This meant that in my old two-hour sessions, I was spending less than half the time in productive energy zones. The second hour was almost entirely low-value — going through the motions, reinforcing existing habits, feeling productive while achieving nothing.
Armed with this data, I restructured radically. My sessions shortened to forty-five to sixty minutes. The first twenty minutes: hardest material, peak energy. The next fifteen: moderately challenging material, good energy. The final ten to fifteen: routine maintenance, declining energy.
The result was less practice time producing more progress. The equation only works if you stop counting minutes and start counting cognitive energy.
The Guilt Problem
The hardest part of the energy investment model isn’t understanding it. It’s overcoming the guilt of short sessions.
After a forty-five-minute session, the voice in my head says: “That was barely anything. Serious practitioners do two hours. Three hours. You’re being lazy.”
That voice is wrong, but it’s loud. It’s the voice of the old blueprint, the one that measures success by time invested. It’s the voice of every well-intentioned teacher who said “you need to practice more.” It’s the voice of a culture that equates hours with dedication.
What silenced the voice, eventually, was the evidence. My practice journal showed faster improvement with shorter sessions. The data didn’t care about my feelings of guilt.
I also came to see the guilt itself as a form of low-value energy. Feeling bad about a short session is an emotional expenditure that serves no productive purpose. The energy spent on guilt would be better saved for tomorrow’s high-value zone.
The Investment Portfolio View
I now think of my weekly practice not as a collection of sessions but as an investment portfolio. Each session is an investment opportunity. The question isn’t “How much time should I spend?” but “How should I allocate my cognitive energy for maximum return?”
Some days, the portfolio allows sixty minutes of productive investment. Other days — after a long day of consulting work, a late flight, poor sleep — the portfolio might only support thirty minutes before the low-value zone kicks in.
Both are fine, as long as the available energy is invested wisely. Thirty minutes of well-allocated energy beats two hours of poorly allocated energy every time.
This portfolio mindset also eliminated the guilt of “bad” days. A short session isn’t a failure. It’s an honest assessment of available energy, followed by an efficient allocation of that energy. Just as a smart investor doesn’t throw money into a declining market, a smart practitioner doesn’t throw depleted focus into demanding material.
Invest what you have. Invest it wisely. Stop when the returns turn negative. It’s simple financial advice applied to cognitive energy, and it works for the same reasons.