Yep - I did miss that important bit of information. Sorry. It's just going to be awkward.
As for the 5 minutes of practice it's also about building muscle memory and developing your brain. Interestingly you can practice your instrument fingering mentally and still continue to improve (according to studies). As you say though - it's also that you are likely to keep going for longer than 5 minutes.
There is also a learning hump. There is a point at which you appear to make little progress and want to give up. At some point you get over the hump and realise you can play what you want to play.
Another interesting article I read a while back was about the fact that instrumental learning practices are still heavily rooted in the Victorian period. We still teach people to read the notes on a page and work out the tune from the notes. There is no particularly good reason that this is a good way to learn an instrument. The Victorians did this because it was the *only* way to learn an instrument and to hear music. We now have music everywhere thanks to technology. So listening and playing along is an equally valid way of learning an instrument. If you want to go professional then you will need to learn the dots and how pitches relate to them, but it doesn't have to be the primary focus of learning.
