How long should you practice magic each day?

The most famous study of expert practice is Anders Ericsson's 1993 paper on deliberate practice, the one behind the 10,000-hour rule. The part that gets quoted less often is what it says about daily limits. Reviewing earlier research on skills like typing, Ericsson and his colleagues found essentially no benefit from practicing more than 4 hours a day, and reduced benefits beyond 2. For many skills, they wrote, the effective amount of deliberate practice may be closer to 1 hour a day.

One of the studies they cite, from 1978, followed 72 British postal workers learning to type. The group that practiced 1 hour a day needed the fewest hours of practice to learn the keyboard. The group that practiced 4 hours a day needed the most.

The elite violinists in Ericsson's own study didn't grind through the day either. They practiced in sessions with breaks between them, and they slept more than the less accomplished players, naps included.

Cal Newport draws the same line in Deep Work: about an hour a day of intense concentration is the limit for someone new to it, and even experts rarely sustain more than 4. Angela Duckworth says much the same in Grit. Deliberate practice is exhausting, and even world-class performers manage about an hour at a time before they need a break.

The key word is deliberate. An hour of shuffling cards in front of the TV doesn't count against the limit, and it doesn't count toward mastery either.

It's important to limit your daily physical practice to keep the pressure healthy and the effort deliberate. A limit works in 2 ways.

First, you're more likely to finish a session that has an end. Put another way, most people feel more alert working against a timer counting down to zero than a stopwatch counting up indefinitely.

Second, your mind stays on the trick long after the session is over. Yu-kai Chou calls this a Torture Break in Actionable Gamification: a forced pause in something you want to keep doing. Because you can't have it right now, you keep thinking about it. When you're forced to stop, you have time to deconstruct and consolidate what you worked on during the downtime (Spaced Intervals).

An hour doesn't have to arrive in one piece. 3 sessions of 20 minutes give you 3 cold starts (Strenuous Recollection) and 2 gaps for your brain to work in (Spaced Intervals). Short sessions are also far easier to protect. Nearly everyone can find 20 minutes. Almost nobody can find a free afternoon.

Short sessions make it easier to show up every day, too, which matters more than any single session. James Clear has a rule for it in Atomic Habits: never miss twice. Anyone can lose a day. It's the second day in a row that turns into a habit of not practicing.

• Decide what the session is for before you start. "Work on the trick" isn't a plan. "Fix the pause before the reveal" is.
• Set a timer that counts down, and stop when it ends, even if you're on a roll.
• Put your phone out of reach, unless it's the camera.
• Split the hour across the day if you can.
• When the physical practice is done, keep going in your head (Mental Practice). That part has no limit.

The limit is per trick, not per day. 3 tricks in daily practice could mean 3 hours, and that's the point where it's worth asking whether all 3 need daily practice at once. Tricks in the Retention and Preservation phases cost far less: a single rehearsal, every so often.

Every practice exercise in Trickifi comes with its own countdown, and a full practice day for a trick adds up to about an hour, rehearsal included. When the day's work is done, Trickifi tells you what's coming next and sends you away until then.

The limit can feel strange at first, like being asked to leave the gym. Trust it. An hour of deliberate practice every day will take you further than a lost weekend once a month.