It takes me at least 10-15 minutes just to warm up, so I guess my answer is exercises. I think they’re important, like work clothes vs. evening clothes, and knowing a lot of them for different techniques is a useful and easy first option.
I also use as exercises a few pieces that are at the very upper end of my playing ability. Nowadays I’m more focused on making simpler material sound good, but I’ve hung on to these pieces because I’ve noticed that if I can get all the way through them, everything else is easier (like vitamin-enriched exercises). They’re less than four minutes long, and a normal first attempt might take up 10-15 minutes.
I sometimes run through the hard parts of different things in my repertoire. It takes some time to identify and isolate the specific problems, and then it takes some forethought to play just the hard parts (without the music that leads up to them), so I don’t often cram that kind of playing into 10-15 minutes, but it seems like a good habit to have.
My favorite thing to play when short on time is a jazzy walking-bass arrangement of a 12-bar blues in G that appeared in the 80s or 90s in Guitar Player magazine in a spread on Tuck Andress and in a guest column by a rock guitarist (Satriani?), and I’ve seen it somewhere else, too. Anyway, if you know what I’m talking about, you can apply different right-hand techniques to the chord progression and it makes for one hell of a workout in very little time. It’s kind of outrageously hard and fun at the same time (you’ll laugh, you’ll cry...) In the Tuck article, the chords are plucked and I also play it in arpeggiated patterns, with index strumming and even Travis picking.
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