That timing thing rings pretty true. If I only have fifteen minutes I do some tsumego. Though, I have to be careful, somehow those can exhaust my focus for other things. In music for example I think scales(Joseki) are a waste of time for amateurs, just learn songs(Fuseki).

I think the analogy between scales/joseki and songs/fuseki is just meaningless, I can't see any remotely strong connection.

As for the general point about amateurs should learn, I suspect it comes down to what the amateur wants to get out of things. I'd say scales are clearly important and useful for improvement past a certain level, and that they are good practice in general for just about anyone. If one is happy with current ability to play a particular set of songs then whatever, but I'm not sure many people would call them a 'waste of time' for anyone looking to improve or practice efficiently.

I don't remember the original context of this proverb but applies equally well to music, go, and everything else:

Miracles start to happen after the first hour of practice.

If you really want to improve you should certainly look into trying to get more time for go instead of trying to do as much as possible in fifteen minutes.

(Also, speaking as a decent amateur musician - I'm not going to waste time arguing with SmoothOper because that never worked well in the past. But he is dead wrong. Please don't ignore scales!)

I'm very amateur (only one year of weekly guitar lessons) but my best weeks were the weeks where I practiced just scales at home. On class day I could easily play the required passages, without needing to "think" about where that A# is. It was just "there" in my fingers.

Have you ever played a guzheng? Good luck playing anything but G pentatonic on it(or D pentatonic if you retune it).

I don't see the point. I was referring to my practice with a guitar. Of course if I'm doing music by smashing my pen against my desktop I'll probably need to learn something which are not scales. But for a piano, guitar and most western scaled instruments, scales are what you need to learn to master the instrument (see biographies of Bill Evans, John Coltrane as example)

If you have a narrow minded "pen bashing" view of music sure lock yourself in your room and practice scales to your hearts desire. My point is there are billions of people who learn music without western notions of scales chords and key modulations, therefore as an amateur musician it is possible to ignore or at least not practice those ideas, and in fact on some instruments you only really have one scale, so there isn't much to practice there anyway.

Narrow minded? Rhythm is the basic building block of music. And I was talking (as most of this post) about instruments that DO need the 'Western notions' of scales, chords, progressions, major, minors and all these funny things.

As someone with a masters degree in music performance I can speak with some small amount of authority on this subject. I partly disagree with Fong's statements as relayed by John Fairbairn. It is true that there is no substitute for hard work, but equating the amount of time you practice with work is a mistake that far too many musicians fall into. When I was preparing for my grad school auditions I was practicing about 8 hours a day, but relatively speaking I did not get much accomplished. The key to mastering music is how you practice. Two hours of well mindful deliberate practice is worth more than 8 hours of drilling a passage mindlessly. Many of the world's most famous and successful classical musicians practice for 2 hours or fewer a day.

Mindful, deliberate practice in when instead of playing a piece over and over again trying to weed out the mistakes, you stop, analyze why the mistake was made, formulate a plan to fix that mistake, and set that plan in motion. This kind of practice takes an incredible amount of concentration, and is exhausting.

In the same way, spending hours a day "studying" go will not benefit you very much of you do not engage in deliberate practice. It takes 10 times the mental effort to practice this way, but the result is correspondingly larger.

All true, but that being said, 15 minutes a day is still not enough no matter how mindfully you practice!

What do you play?

Miracles start to happen after the first hour of practice.