Contemporary programmes frequently recommend very short practices repeated during a day rather than a single long session. The recommendation rests on how the skill is used rather than on convenience alone.
The skill is needed in ordinary conditions
A settled state produced in a quiet room does not automatically appear during a difficult meeting, because the conditions share almost nothing.
Attention trained only in one setting tends to remain associated with that setting, which practitioners notice when a stable morning practice makes no apparent difference by mid-afternoon.
Brief practices scattered through the day address this directly by rehearsing the same movement of attention in the circumstances where it is actually wanted.
Short practices survive schedules that long ones do not
A commitment requiring a substantial uninterrupted block competes with work, caregiving and sleep, and loses regularly.
Something lasting a minute or two fits into gaps that already exist, between tasks, before a call or while waiting for something else.
Regularity matters more than duration for maintaining a practice at all, and an approach that survives a demanding week is worth more than one that only works on quiet ones.
Transitions are the natural insertion points
Moments between activities are already breaks in attention, so using them requires no additional interruption of anything.
Common suggestions attach a brief practice to arriving somewhere, finishing a task or putting down a device, which supplies the cue without needing a reminder.
Traditional practice communities did something structurally similar with fixed hours and bells, dividing the day rather than reserving a portion of it.
Very short practices do different work
A minute is not long enough for the states that longer sitting produces, and presenting it as an equivalent misrepresents both.
What a brief practice does is interrupt momentum and register the current state, which is a narrower and still useful function.
Most teachers therefore describe the two as complementary, with longer sessions developing capacity and short ones applying it, rather than treating brevity as a compromise.
Workplace programmes have attracted real criticism
Offering attention training in response to working conditions that are themselves the source of the strain has been criticised as shifting responsibility onto individuals for a problem they did not create.
The objection is generally not about the practices themselves, which most critics accept as useful, but about what a programme is being used to substitute for and what it lets an employer avoid addressing.
Practitioners can hold both positions at once, finding a short practice genuinely useful while recognising that it does not address workload, staffing or job design.