Why practise at all
Finding a good answer quickly is a skill of search: you ask your memory a question and it needs to return something specific. Like any skill, it improves with short, regular practice, and the best practice does not need a screen.
Six short exercises
- Category sprints. Pick any category. Set a timer for sixty seconds and write as many items as you can. Next day, try to beat the count.
- Second pass. Take yesterday’s list and strike out the five most obvious items. What replaces them?
- Letter ladders. Choose a category and name one item for each letter you can manage. Some letters will be impossible; that is part of the point.
- The notebook. Keep a small notebook of interesting words you meet: foods, animals, places, tools. Reading it back gives you a store of uncommon answers.
- Odd one out. With a friend, each write down three items in a category and see whose list is the more unusual.
- Explain it. Take an unusual answer you think of and explain it to someone in one sentence. If you can, you know it well enough to use it under pressure.
Warm-up in detail: the second-pass drill
This drill takes about five minutes and is the most useful of the six. Pick a category at random, for example “things in a garden”. Set a sixty-second timer and write every item you can. Stop at the buzzer. Now read your list and cross out the five items you wrote first. Those are your crowd answers, the ones everyone would have written. Look at what is left: the later entries, the ones that took effort. Those are the shape of an uncommon answer.
Next, spend a further sixty seconds adding more items that are as far from the crossed-out ones as you can get. Notice the technique you use. Some people go smaller (parts of a plant), some go to a different kind of garden, some go to the tools, some go to the creatures. Whatever your habit is, name it, because you will use the same move under the 25-second clock.
The notebook habit, in detail
Keep a note on your phone called “words”. Whenever you see an interesting real thing you could not have named a week ago, such as a type of cloud, a kitchen tool, a regional dish, a bridge, a bird, write it down. Do not worry about order. A month of this builds a private bank of uncommon answers. When you read it back, you will find your own memory has absorbed more than you expected.
What not to do
- Do not memorise lists of rare words; it does not transfer.
- Do not practise for long stretches; short and regular beats long and rare.
- Do not compare your practice with other people’s scores; your aim is a better habit, not a higher number.
A weekly routine
You do not need a lot of time. Five minutes on two or three days a week, plus the daily flight, is plenty. Many players find that the warm-ups matter most in the first week; after that, the habit of looking sideways at a category becomes automatic.
Pair this guide with twelve ways to get unstuck and how to score higher.