Playing when life gets busy: four small ways to keep your guitar in your week

Most people don’t stop playing guitar because they decide to. It happens quietly. Work gets busy, the evenings fill up, and the guitar goes back in its case for “just this week”. A few months later, it’s still there.

If that sounds familiar, you’re in good company. And the fix is usually smaller than you’d expect. Keeping your playing going through a busy patch is less about finding more time and more about making the guitar easy to pick up.

Here are four things that help.

1. Keep it out of the case

A guitar in a case under the bed is a guitar you have to decide to play. A guitar on a stand in the corner of the room is one you pick up while the pasta’s boiling.

If you only change one thing, make it this. A simple stand or wall hanger does the job. Seeing your guitar every day is half the battle.

2. Five minutes counts

When the week is full, an hour of practice feels impossible, so it doesn’t happen at all. Five minutes is different.

Pick one small thing: a chord change that keeps tripping you up, or the opening of a riff you love. Give it five minutes, then stop if you need to. Little and often beats one long session a fortnight, and five minutes has a habit of turning into fifteen.

3. Hook it onto something you already do

New habits stick better when they ride on old ones. Play while the kettle boils. Run through a song before you open your laptop in the evening. Do your five minutes straight after dinner.

Once it’s tied to something you do anyway, you don’t have to remember to practise. The routine does the remembering for you.

4. Finish on something you love

It’s tempting to spend your few precious minutes on exercises. Do a bit of that if it helps, but always finish on a song you enjoy playing, even one you’ve known for years.

That’s what makes you want to come back tomorrow. Playing should feel like the best part of your day, not another job on the list.

If you’ve stopped altogether

That’s fine, and you’re far from the only one. Your hands remember more than you think. Pick a song you used to know, play it rough, and enjoy it anyway. The second time is always easier.

Playing with other people helps too

One of the best ways to keep going is having somewhere to be. When there’s a session or a band workshop in your diary, the guitar comes out of the case because you’re looking forward to it, not because you feel you should.

That’s how we run things at KitchenJam: structure when you need it, freedom when you don’t. If you’re new to us, your first session is a free trial session (we call it a Soundcheck), at Canary Wharf or East Village.

Everyone’s made to play.