Adult students ask me this in the first lesson, almost without exception. They're usually braced for me to say two hours a day, and quietly worried they can't give it.
The honest answer is more encouraging than that — and more demanding in a different way.
Twenty focused minutes beats two distracted hours
For an adult beginner, 20 to 30 minutes of concentrated practice, most days, is enough to make real, visible progress. What matters is not the total time on the bench. It's the quality of attention during it, and the consistency across the week.
Six short sessions beat one long weekend marathon every time. This isn't motivational encouragement — it's how motor learning works. Skills consolidate between sessions, during rest and sleep. Frequent, spaced repetition builds them; one long cram does not.
So if your life gives you 20 minutes, you have enough. Take it daily.
What "focused" actually means
Here's the uncomfortable part. Most people who say they practise an hour a day are playing for an hour — which is not the same thing.
Playing through a piece from start to finish, enjoying the good bits, stumbling in the same place, then starting again from the top is not practice. It's rehearsal of your mistakes. You will repeat that stumble for months.
Practice is: identify the specific bar that fails, slow it down until it's correct, repeat it correctly several times, then put it back in context. That's it. That's the whole discipline — and it's why 20 real minutes outperform two hours of playing through.
A structure that works
Here is how I'd spend a 25-minute session:
Warm-up (3 min). Hands rubbed warm, fists opened five times, then a simple five-finger exercise — C–D–E–F–G up and down, each hand. Watch your hand shape, not the clock.
Technique or theory (7 min). One thing only: a scale, a chord shape, intervals, or reading practice. Small and specific.
The hard bar (10 min). The heart of the session. Take the passage that isn't working, isolate it, halve the tempo, and get it right five times in a row. If you can't get it right, slow down further — the tempo is the problem, not you.
Play for pleasure (5 min). End with something you can already play, purely because you enjoy it. This is not wasted time. It's what makes you come back tomorrow, and coming back tomorrow is the entire game.
Count out loud — yes, really
One habit does more for adult beginners than any other: counting out loud while you play. "One, two, three, four." It feels awkward for about three days, then it starts holding your rhythm steady in a way that internal counting never quite does.
Rhythm, not notes, is what makes playing sound musical rather than mechanical. Counting aloud is the cheapest way to fix it.
What progress really looks like
Progress isn't linear, and it isn't fast for anyone — not for children, not for adults, not for conservatory students. It arrives in plateaus and sudden jumps. You'll work at something for two weeks with no apparent change, and then one morning it's simply easier.
Adults tend to interpret the plateau as failure and quit during it. Please don't. The plateau is where the learning is being consolidated. The jump comes after it, and only if you keep showing up.
The one rule
If I could give you a single rule, it would be this: never practise a mistake up to speed. Play it slowly enough to be correct. Accuracy first, speed as the reward.
Twenty honest minutes a day, played correctly and slowly, will take you further in six months than you expect. That's not encouragement — that's what I've watched happen with student after student.