If you’ve ever sat down to practise and felt immediately overwhelmed — too many things to work on, not enough time, focus drifting after ten minutes — there’s a method that directly addresses all of that. It’s called interleaving, and once you understand it you’ll want to implement it straight away.
What you’ll get out of this lesson: A clear understanding of interleaving practice versus block practice, why the science supports it, and a simple system you can put into use in your very next session. The quick-start guide is at the top; everything below it explains why it works so you can adapt it intelligently to your own schedule.
Quick-Start Guide
- Pick 4–8 subjects.
- Pick a block length between 4–20 minutes depending on how much time you have and how many subjects you’ve chosen.
- Cycle through your chosen subjects in a random order. Change strictly when the timer runs out. An app like MetroTimer works well for this.
Block Practice vs. Interleaving: What’s the Difference?
Block practice is the traditional approach: work through each subject in one long chunk, one after another, and don’t revisit any of them until tomorrow — much like a school timetable. It works for some people, but it has clear disadvantages: it’s hard to focus for a full hour on one thing, boredom sets in, and if your session gets interrupted you can lose an entire subject. Perhaps most damaging is the anxiety that builds when you’re staring down five consecutive hours of practice. Interleaving breaks each subject into shorter blocks and cycles through all of them multiple times across the day. The total time spent on each subject — the volume — stays the same; what changes is the shape of how you get there.
Volume, Density, and Frequency
Three terms are worth understanding here. Practice volume is simply the total time you spend practising. Subject volume is how much of that time goes to any one subject. Density is a percentage — how much of the elapsed time between your first and last practice session is actually spent practising. And frequency is how many times you visit a subject in a day. Block practice gives each subject a frequency of one. Interleaving increases frequency (you might visit sight-reading four or six times) while spreading it out and lowering its density. That spreading — coming back to something multiple times across a day — is precisely where the learning benefit lives.
Why Interleaving Produces More Focused Practice
Think of focus as existing on a continuum from hyper-focused at one end to completely zoned out at the other. When you start on a subject you’re sharp; over time, you drift. What interleaving does is reset that continuum every time you switch subjects. You start fresh on the next thing, and by the time your focus would begin to wander, it’s already time to change again. The result is that every block of practice is drawn from the high-focus end of that continuum, rather than a long tail of diminishing returns. Studies on interleaving also report subjective benefits: students feel more goal-oriented, notice more improvement within sessions, and retain information better over the long term.
I found that when it comes to things I don’t like to do, I’m able to sandwich them, wedge them between two things that I like to do, so I kind of get this dopamine sandwich — I’m coming out of a high, then I’ll do some sight reading, and then I’ve got something to look forward to after that.
Practical Tips for Implementation
Keep it simple when you start — pick your subjects, set a timer, and cycle through them. As you get comfortable with the method you can begin to programme your subjects around your own rhythms: more cognitively demanding work when you’re most alert, technique closer to when your hands are warm. Opportunistic micro-sessions — a six-minute block while you’re waiting for something — count and add up. The only real caveat the research raises is the feeling of leaving a problem unresolved when the timer goes. Studies show that stepping away and returning actually produces better long-term progress, even when it feels uncomfortable in the moment. If interleaving genuinely doesn’t suit you after a proper trial, adherence to a plan you can stick to is always more important than the theoretically optimal method.
Taking it further: The studies listed below the original lesson text are worth a look if you want to understand the science more deeply, particularly the work by Rohrer and colleagues on interleaved mathematics learning and the Carter & Grahn study on music specifically. The book Understanding How We Learn is an excellent accessible overview of the research.
Further Reading and References
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-interleaving-effect-mixing-it-up-boosts-learning/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24960171/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4989027/
https://www.learningscientists.org/interleaving
https://www.learningscientists.org/learning-scientists-podcast/2017/12/6/episode-8-interleaving
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Understanding-How-We-Learn-Visual/dp/113856172X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=TX994MYR4ZVX&dchild=1&keywords=understanding+how+we+learn&qid=1594751297&sprefix=understanding+how+we+%2Caps%2C211&sr=8-1
Further Studies from the book —
(1) Taylor, K., & Rohrer, D. (2010). The effects of interleaved practice. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 24, 837–848.
(2) Shea, J. B., & Morgan, R. L. (1979). Contextual interference effects on the acquisition, retention, and transfer of a motor skill. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 5, 179–187.
(3) Rohrer, D., Dedrick, R. F., & Stershic, S. (2015). Interleaved practice improves mathematics learning. Journal of Educational Psychology, 107, 900–908.
(4) Carter, C. E., & Grahn, J. A. (2016). Optimizing music learning: Exploring how blocked and interleaved practice schedules affect advanced performance. Frontiers in Psychology, 7.
(5) Rohrer, D. (2012). Interleaving helps students distinguish among similar concepts. Educational Psychology Review, 24, 355–367.
Your homework: This week, redesign one practice session using the interleaving method. Choose four to six subjects you already need to work on, set a timer for ten or fifteen minutes per subject, and cycle through all of them at least twice. Note how your focus and energy compare to a standard block session. Bring your observations — positive or negative — back to the group.