Society seems to have taught us to do things by sessions mesured in hours. We work 8 (or even more) hours a day on the same tasks at our job, so why would it be different when we want to work on our own projects at home? Simply because after work, we don’t have the time and energy to do that, and for some, we can’t manage do the same thing for so long.
What I’m trying to say here is that even if you can’t/don’t want to amputate a full day of your already too short weekend, you can still manage to progress in something that matters to you.
My bass guitar teacher once said: “You’re better praticing only 15 minutes a day than not a all”. 15 minutes doesn’t seem like a big deal, but at the end of the week I would still have practiced for an hour and 45 minutes. And that’s a lot better than 0 minute.
It doesn’t only apply to music, I’m currently building a website using this method, I work for about 30 minutes then go to something else, sometimes I’m in a good mood for more and I can work for an hour or two. My website is growing slowy, but at least it’s not left to rot somewhere on my computer’s hard drive. Slow progress is still better than no progress at all. Sometimes it can take up to 4 days to write an article for this blog (by their length you could think that I write them in 5 minutes but it’s not the case) because I write for some time and then stop when I don’t feel it anymore and I come back the next day to write a few more lines and add new ideas.
I like this method because I can see some progression while keeping away from the feeling of lacking time to do all the things I have to do in a week. I also think that the slow progress makes a more “mature” result in the end. The multiple sessions help keep the project in my head so I’m always thinking about ways to improve it.
I agree that you can’t apply this to everything because some activities are long by nature but for the ones that can be splited in multiple sessions, it could be nice to give it a try. It doesn’t matter how long it takes to achieve something as long as you keep working on it.