Start with two minutes of practice. Then repeat.

Since "mom hockey" players are not NHL stars, we have our day jobs and family responsibilities that take up a lot of our time. We all try and maximize our opportunities to play, but our ice time is typically league games, or shinny. Unless you take lessons, how can you work on specific skills ? And even with lessons, let's face it, they only last about 7 sessions, and leave you wanting more. What to do?

I know from playing the piano for many years that improvements in skill actually occur between practice sessions, not during them. If you only have, say, an hour to spend on working on a piano piece, you get more benefit from doing four 15-minutes practice sessions over four days than playing for a whole hour, once only.

In my first year of playing hockey I realized I was never going to get tons of ice time to practice specific skills, so I applied the same technique to improve my weakest skills. That year, it was changing skating direction (forward-to-backward and backward-to-forward), and hockey stops. All I did was took a couple of minutes at the beginning of shinny, when everyone is doodling around the ice with the puck anyway, and did a couple of laps, practicing those specific moves. Literally, it was no more than three laps, total. On the first two laps, I used the (fairly common) drill of changing from forward to backward skating at the blue line, and then to forward again at the next blue line, making sure to alternate which side I was turning on. On the third lap, I would stop at all the lines, again doing both sides. After that, I did the same as everyone else on the ice and enjoyed some time practicing puck handling and shooting before the shinny session itself. In those days, I played shinny three times a week. I even did the practice in a more limited way during warm-up before games, just once each side. The improvement was noticeable, and quick, for very little overall effort. All it took was consistent practice, spread over different days. 

This year my aim is to improve my power turns and pivots while carrying the puck. Same plan. I've been practicing them using the face-off dots just outside the blue line, which results in the least disruption for the other players warming up. Just keep skating back and forth between them, turning or pivoting around each dot. No more than about 10 turns total, 5 per side, is really all I'm doing. I only get one shinny session per week now. But I can already feel a difference and I've only done it a few times so far. 

Given the minimal time investment and substantial payback, you have nothing to lose. Start with two minutes of practice. Then repeat.