In the early years, my hotel room practice sessions had a consistent shape: I’d sit down with a deck, start running through things, and surface two and a half to three hours later having practiced extensively and improved almost nothing.
“Practiced extensively” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. What I actually did was practice comfortably — running the things I already did reasonably well, visiting the problems briefly and then retreating when they resisted, enjoying the sensation of material flowing smoothly while avoiding the friction of material that didn’t.
I logged the hours. I thought the hours were the variable that mattered. I was wrong about this for longer than I’d like to admit.
The shift came from two sources almost simultaneously: the deliberate practice research I was reading, which made the distinction between practice time and deliberate practice time very clear, and my own experience from consulting, where I’d watched the same dynamic play out in different form a hundred times. Busy is not the same as productive. Effort is not the same as effectiveness. Time in the chair is not the same as useful work.
Eventually I connected those professional observations to my practice habits and felt the uncomfortable click of recognizing a problem I’d been choosing not to look at directly.
What Noodling Actually Is
Let me describe the noodling session precisely, because it looks from the outside like diligent practice.
You sit down with your material. You run through a sequence. It goes okay. You run through it again. It goes slightly better. You feel the warm satisfaction of something working. You stay with the working thing a little longer than you need to, because it feels good. You eventually move to something that doesn’t work, spend a few minutes on it, get frustrated, decide it’s “a work in progress,” and move back to something that works. By the end of the session you have high practice time and low new learning.
The fundamental problem with noodling is that it optimizes for feeling like practice rather than for learning. The things that feel good to practice are the things you’ve already partially mastered. The things that produce actual skill development are the things that are difficult — and difficulty is not enjoyable enough to sustain for three hours voluntarily, so you unconsciously drift away from it.
Three hours of noodling produces less learning than forty-five minutes of deliberate work, because the deliberate work stays in the difficult zone and the noodling avoids it.
The Structure That Changed Everything
My current sessions run forty-five minutes with a defined structure that I plan before I sit down.
The first thing I do before the session starts: write down one specific outcome I want to have achieved by the end. Not “work on show” or “practice effects.” Something specific: “achieve reliable execution of this particular sequence at performance speed without conscious attention to the technical elements.” Or: “develop a smooth transition between these two pieces that feels natural rather than constructed.”
One outcome. Specific enough that I’ll know, at the end of forty-five minutes, whether I’ve achieved it.
This single practice changes everything about the session, because it gives me a filter for every decision within it. If something I’m doing is contributing to the stated outcome, I continue. If something I’m doing is not contributing to the stated outcome — even if it’s enjoyable, even if it’s going well — I stop doing it and redirect.
The redirect is the hardest part. When something’s going well, stopping feels wrong. Momentum feels like it should be honored. But the session has a goal, and enjoying a thing that isn’t the goal is still noodling, even if it looks like practice.
The Four-Block Structure
Within the forty-five minutes, I work in four blocks of roughly ten minutes each, with five minutes at the end for notes and planning.
Block one: review without repetition. This is the “what am I actually trying to do and why” block. I think through the specific outcome I identified, the specific problem or sequence or transition I’m working on, and what I currently understand about it. I don’t do any repetitions in this block. I think, mentally rehearse, and identify what I expect to be difficult.
Block two: targeted work at the difficulty point. This is the high-intensity block. I work specifically at the most difficult part of the sequence — not the whole sequence, just the part that’s generating the most friction. I don’t run through the easy parts to warm up. I go directly to the hard part and work there.
Block three: integration. I put the difficult part back into context — run it as part of the larger sequence, starting slightly before the difficult section and ending slightly after it. This tests whether the isolated work in block two transfers to realistic conditions.
Block four: consolidation at performance speed. I run the whole thing at the pace I’d actually perform it, with whatever mental state I can approximate to a real performance situation. This is not about getting it perfect — it’s about consolidating what the earlier blocks worked on under conditions that approximate what performance actually requires.
Five minutes of notes: what worked, what didn’t, what the next session’s outcome should be. This planning step ensures continuity — the next session starts where this one ended, rather than from scratch.
The Deliberate Practice Research Behind This
When I was reading through the research on deliberate practice — the science of how elite performers in any domain actually develop their skills — the most striking finding was not about time but about zone.
The learning that produces genuine skill development happens in the zone of proximal difficulty — the edge of what you can do, where success is possible but not guaranteed, where every attempt requires your full attention and produces either information or progress. Spend time there and you learn. Spend time below it and you maintain.
The noodling session is almost entirely below that zone. The deliberate session is designed to stay near it.
Forty-five focused minutes in the zone of proximal difficulty produces more learning than three relaxed hours wandering around it. The math is uncomfortable if you’ve been measuring your practice in hours, but it’s consistent with both the research and with my own experience tracking progress against time.
What the Hotel Room Looks Like Now
Late evening, some Austrian city, show tomorrow or in two days. The room is small and the desk is too far from the mirror, so I improvise. I have forty-five minutes before I want to try to sleep.
I write the outcome on the back of a receipt or in my phone. I work through the four blocks. I make notes. I stop.
I don’t run everything I know. I don’t check in on things that are working. I do one specific piece of work on one specific problem and I stop when the time is up.
The sessions feel shorter than the noodling sessions used to, even though they’re a fraction of the duration. Concentrated attention feels fast. Wandering attention feels long, and doesn’t go anywhere in particular.
The morning after a properly structured session, I can feel the difference. Something consolidated overnight that wasn’t consolidated before. The specific problem I worked on has been processed, and the next session can start from the new position rather than from where I was before.
The three hours felt like more. The forty-five minutes accomplished more.
Know the difference. Then choose the one that actually works.