There’s a particular feeling I used to chase during practice sessions. It’s the feeling of having put in the time. The clock reads ninety minutes, the deck is warm in my hands, and there’s a satisfying sense that I’ve earned something through sheer duration. I practiced for an hour and a half. That must count for something.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that the last thirty minutes of those sessions were not just unproductive. They were actively harmful.
The “Art of Practice” introduced me to a concept that reframed everything I thought I knew about practice duration: low-value energy. The idea is simple but devastating in its implications. When your focus fades and your energy drops below a certain threshold, you enter a state where practice becomes counterproductive. You’re still moving your hands. You’re still running through the routine. But the quality of your attention has degraded to the point where you’re no longer driving adaptation — you’re reinforcing mediocrity.
That concept hit me like a freight train, because I recognized exactly what it described.
The Ninety-Minute Wall
Here’s how my practice sessions used to look in those early hotel room years.
I’d come back from a full day of consulting work. Dinner. Maybe a glass of wine. Then I’d clear the small desk, pull out the deck, and start working. The first twenty to thirty minutes were always the best. My attention was fresh, my fingers were responsive, and every repetition felt purposeful. I could feel myself making progress because I was fully present, noticing the small errors, correcting them in real time, pushing into the zone where adaptation actually happens.
Around the forty-five minute mark, things started to drift. Not dramatically — just a subtle softening of attention. I’d catch myself running through a sequence on autopilot rather than actively monitoring each movement. I’d miss errors I would have caught twenty minutes earlier. My focus would wander to the consulting presentation I needed to finish, or to the email I forgot to send.
By the sixty to seventy minute mark, the drift had become a slide. I was physically going through the motions, but my mind was only partially engaged. The movements felt mechanical. I’d occasionally snap back to full attention, realize I’d been practicing sloppily for the last five minutes, and try to re-engage. But the re-engagement never held. It was like trying to restart a car with a dying battery — it might turn over briefly, but it wasn’t going to run.
And then there was the last stretch. Minutes seventy through ninety. Looking back, those minutes were where the real damage happened. My focus was so depleted that I wasn’t just failing to improve — I was actively training bad habits. Sloppy angles. Inconsistent timing. Movements that were close enough to correct that I didn’t consciously register them as wrong, but different enough from correct that they were building neural pathways I’d later have to dismantle.
I was practicing errors and calling it practice.
What Low-Value Energy Actually Does
The mechanism is straightforward once you see it.
Your brain requires focused attention to drive the adaptation process. When you’re fully engaged — noticing errors, making conscious corrections, pushing beyond your current ability — the neural pathways you’re building are precise and efficient. Each repetition lays down myelin on the right pathways, reinforcing the correct movements, the correct timing, the correct coordination.
When your focus drops below the threshold needed for this active monitoring, something different happens. You’re still laying down myelin. The nervous system doesn’t stop building pathways just because you’re tired. But without focused attention directing the process, the pathways you’re reinforcing are whatever happens to be occurring — including the errors, the shortcuts, the sloppy compromises your tired brain and hands default to.
This is the trap. It feels like you’re still practicing because you’re still doing the physical movements. The deck is in your hands. You’re running the sequence. From the outside, it looks identical to productive practice. But the internal quality — the level of attention driving the process — has collapsed below the threshold where adaptation works in your favor.
You’re not just wasting time. You’re building the wrong infrastructure.
The Consulting Parallel
I should have recognized this pattern earlier, because I’d seen the identical dynamic in my consulting work for years.
There’s a well-documented phenomenon in knowledge work: after roughly four to five hours of deep analytical work, the quality of your thinking degrades dramatically. The consulting firms I worked with knew this. The best analysts didn’t grind for twelve straight hours on a strategy deck. They worked in focused blocks, took genuine breaks, and came back fresh. The analysts who bragged about pulling all-nighters consistently produced lower-quality work than those who slept and resumed in the morning.
Diminishing returns. It’s one of the most basic concepts in economics, and yet I was completely ignoring it in my practice.
In consulting, I’d learned to recognize the moment when my analytical sharpness dropped. I’d be building a financial model, and I’d notice that I was making more errors, second-guessing decisions I’d normally make instantly, staring at the screen without processing what I was looking at. When that happened, I stopped. Not because I was lazy, but because I knew that continuing would produce work I’d have to redo in the morning.
The same logic applies to practice, and the stakes are arguably higher. A mediocre paragraph in a consulting report can be rewritten. A sloppy movement pattern wired into your neuromuscular system through hundreds of unfocused repetitions is much harder to undo. You can delete a bad sentence. You can’t as easily delete a bad habit.
The Shift to Shorter, More Intense Sessions
Once I understood what was happening, I restructured my entire approach to practice.
The old model: long sessions, typically sixty to ninety minutes, with quality starting high and degrading steadily over time. Total practice time looked impressive. Actual productive practice time was maybe forty minutes, bookended by a warm-up period and a long tail of deteriorating quality.
The new model: shorter sessions, typically twenty-five to forty minutes, with quality maintained at a high level throughout. Sometimes I’d do two shorter sessions separated by a genuine break. Total clock time was often less than before, but productive practice time was higher because there was no garbage tail at the end.
The hotel room context actually made this easier than it might sound. I didn’t have a dedicated practice space that I had to travel to. The deck was right there on the nightstand. I could do a focused twenty-five minute session after dinner, take a real break — read something, watch something, go for a walk down the hotel corridor — and then do another twenty-minute session before bed if I felt the energy was there. Two sharp sessions instead of one long blurry one.
The results were immediate and obvious. Within a couple of weeks, I noticed that I was spending less time correcting errors that I’d accidentally trained in. My progress between sessions was more consistent. I wasn’t having those frustrating experiences where a technique that felt good on Monday somehow felt worse on Wednesday — because on Monday, I’d been wiring in garbage during the last thirty minutes of the session, and by Wednesday, that garbage had partially consolidated.
The Hardest Part: Learning to Stop
I’ll be honest — the hardest part of this shift was emotional, not logical.
Stopping a practice session while you still feel like you could keep going feels wrong. There’s a deep-seated belief, probably rooted in work ethic and discipline narratives, that more is always better. That stopping early is quitting. That the people who achieve great things are the ones who push through when everyone else stops.
And in some contexts, that’s true. Pushing through discomfort is often necessary. But there’s a critical difference between pushing through difficulty and pushing through depleted focus. Difficulty is productive. Your brain is engaged, the challenge is real, and the adaptation mechanism is firing. Depleted focus is not productive. Your brain has checked out, and you’re just generating noise that the system will faithfully encode.
Learning to distinguish between these two states — genuinely challenging practice versus merely effortful practice — was one of the most important meta-skills I developed.
The signal I learned to watch for: the moment I catch myself needing to “snap back” to attention. The first time in a session that I realize my mind has wandered and I don’t know exactly what my hands have been doing for the last sixty seconds. That’s the yellow flag. It doesn’t mean I stop immediately — sometimes a brief mental reset can restore focus for another few minutes. But if the wandering happens twice in quick succession, I’m done. Session over. Put the deck down.
It felt like giving up at first. Now it feels like quality control.
The Counterintuitive Efficiency of Less
Here’s the thing that took the longest to accept: I was making more progress with less total practice time.
Not a little more. Significantly more. The reason was straightforward once I understood the mechanism. An hour of focused practice produces an hour of correct reinforcement. Ninety minutes of practice where the last thirty are unfocused produces sixty minutes of correct reinforcement and thirty minutes of incorrect reinforcement. The net result of the longer session can actually be worse than the shorter one, because you’re spending part of the next session undoing the damage from the end of the previous one.
It’s like driving a car where you periodically grab the wheel and steer into a ditch. Sure, you’re covering miles. But some of those miles are in the wrong direction, and you have to backtrack.
The math is unforgiving. If every minute of a thirty-minute session is productive, you get thirty units of productive practice. If forty-five minutes of a ninety-minute session are productive and the other forty-five are counterproductive, you might net zero — or worse. The longer session looks more impressive on paper but produces less actual progress.
What I Tell People Now
When someone tells me they practiced for three hours, my first question is: “How much of that was genuinely focused?”
Usually, they don’t know. They haven’t been monitoring their attention quality because they were too busy congratulating themselves on the duration. Three hours! What dedication! What discipline!
But duration without quality is just time spent in a room with a prop in your hands. It’s not practice in any meaningful sense. It’s occupying a space where practice could happen while your attention drifts somewhere else.
The metric that matters isn’t how long you practiced. It’s how many minutes of that practice were spent with full engagement — noticing errors in real time, making conscious corrections, pushing into the challenge zone where adaptation happens.
Twenty-five focused minutes will beat two hours of declining attention every single time.
I know this because I lived on both sides of that equation. The hotel room sessions that felt most virtuous — the long, grinding, disciplined ones — produced the least progress. The sessions that felt almost too short — the sharp, intense, stop-before-you-want-to ones — produced the most.
Low-value energy isn’t just wasted time. It’s practice that works against you. And the only defense is learning to recognize it and having the discipline — the real discipline, not the grind-through-everything kind — to stop.
Put the deck down. Walk away. Come back when your focus is genuine.
That’s not quitting. That’s the most sophisticated practice strategy I’ve ever learned.